"Google has open-sourced its protocol buffers, the company's lingua franca for encoding various types of data, in order to set the stage for a wave of new releases, according to official company blog posts and documents.
"'Practically everyone inside Google' uses protocol buffers, states a FAQ page. 'We have many other projects we would like to release as open source that use protocol buffers, so to do this, we needed to release protocol buffers first...'"
