Two agent releases worth holding side by side. goose is a general-purpose agent that runs on your machine: open source, built in Rust, a native desktop app and CLI, extensible through MCP, originally created by Block and now under the Agentic AI Foundation at the Linux Foundation. Microsoft Foundry's hosted agents are the opposite shape: you ship your agent as a container or a zip and Foundry runs it for you, with a managed endpoint, autoscaling, a dedicated Entra identity, session state, and built-in observability.
It's tempting to file this as open versus closed, or local versus cloud, and miss the actual axis. The real split is control and locality against managed scale. On-machine means your data and tools stay where they are, latency is local, and the agent can touch the filesystem and apps directly. Hosted means you trade that for identity, governance, scaling, and not running any infrastructure yourself. Those aren't competing answers to one question. They're answers to two different questions.
So the useful move isn't picking a side, it's sorting your agents by which question they're actually asking. Which of yours genuinely needs to run on the machine, and which only needs to run reliably somewhere?