In maven, don't you need to update the pom file of the projects to point to the local copy? What's nice about the Go workspace system is that the workspace lives above the individual modules, meaning that the individual modules don't need any modification to pull in local dependencies.

E.g. if your workspace looks like this:

    workspace/
        mod1/
        mod2/

Then both mod1 and mod2 will pull their dependencies remotely.

But if you add a file to workspace/go.work, then local versions of mod1 and mod2 can be used without changing either mod1 or mod2.