E171: How Companies Like Block Build Viral Open Source Projects
Apr 3, 2025
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Manik Surtani, Head of Open Source at Block, and Bradley Axen, Principal Engineer, share their insights on launching successful open source projects. They delve into the formation of Block's Open Source Programs Office, emphasizing community engagement and transparent practices. They discuss the innovative Goose project, which automates coding tasks and evolves through user collaboration. The duo also highlights challenges in integrating open source with AI, showcasing its significance in enhancing productivity and addressing real-world applications.
Block's open source strategy fosters a culture of openness by leveraging existing solutions and encouraging community contributions, enhancing both internal operations and external collaboration.
The Goose project exemplifies innovation in automating engineering tasks, significantly improving productivity by integrating seamlessly with diverse platforms while evolving as a community-driven initiative.
Deep dives
Block's Open Source Strategy Overview
Block's open source strategy emphasizes a culture of openness, where the default approach is to leverage existing open source solutions rather than creating proprietary software. The initiative includes fostering collaboration within the company and actively contributing to external open source communities, ensuring that their projects not only serve internal needs but also enrich the larger ecosystem. Manik Sertani, head of open source at Block, highlights the importance of setting a culture where engineers are encouraged to contribute to open source and provide a robust support system for community engagement. This strategic shift aims to enhance internal operations while ensuring that vital open source projects, like Goose, receive proper attention and resources.
Goose: Revolutionizing Engineering Productivity
Goose is an innovative open source agent framework developed to streamline engineering tasks, transforming how developers interact with AI tools. Originally born out of frustrations with repetitive coding tasks, it enables users to automate processes previously reliant on manual intervention, significantly increasing productivity. Goose's ability to integrate with diverse platforms, such as Google Drive and Slack, exemplifies its versatility, catering to a wide range of user needs beyond just technical engineering challenges. As adoption grows within Block, with thousands of engineers actively utilizing its capabilities, Goose is evolving into a community-driven project with continual improvements from internal and external users alike.
Community Engagement and Contribution Strategies
Block's open source program office has recognized the importance of effective community engagement, transitioning from a mixed approach to a structured strategy that fosters collaboration. This initiative includes creating frameworks for projects like Goose to identify when and how to build supportive communities, balancing open development with internal project goals. By embedding developer relations teams into open source projects, Block aims to cultivate vibrant communities that encourage user feedback and contributions. The successful responses observed for Goose's public standups and engaging communication channels underscore the value of transparency and interaction in building a thriving contributor ecosystem.
The Future of Open Source at Block
Block envisions a future where open source principles drive not only its product development but also its operational strategies across various sectors, including finance and AI. With a commitment to transparency and community participation, the company plans to explore deeper levels of collaboration and greater openness in its offerings, which may include open sourcing more complex financial tools. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) exemplifies this ambition, providing an innovative way to integrate different AI models seamlessly. As Block continues to embrace open source, it aims to position itself as a leader in the tech industry, paving the way for increased collaboration and innovation across multiple domains.
Manik Surtani is Head of Open Source and Bradley Axen is Principal Engineer at Block. Manik was key to launching Block's Open Source Programs Office and Bradley is a major open source contributor - including the project Goose which is Block's extensible AI agent project. It currently has over 11K stars on GitHub and has been used for a number of internal use cases at Block as well as by the general AI builder ecosystem.
In this episode, we dig into:
Block's history releasing and supporting open source projects, and how that led to the creation of the programs office
How big companies like Block approach open source and come up with ideas for projects like Goose
The Goose project and how it's different from other agent frameworks
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