The Protobuf Language Specification
&gt; we are standing on the shoulders of giants, those who have built and battle-tested it, and brought it to its current mature state<p>I would rewrite this maybe to:<p>&gt; we are making Google&#x27;s internal problems into everyone&#x27;s problems<p>There are benefits to an IDL in the abstract, but an IDL for everyone should be built with the benefit of hindsight looking at the lessons of protobuf, ion, thrift, etc. Not just baking Google&#x27;s internal backwards compatibility obligations into a formal spec everyone should follow.<p>I think any time google takes an internal tool and flips the &quot;open source&quot; bit on it, it turns out to be a bad match for the rest of the world. When they instead take the time to build a new system that learns from the internal tool, like Kubernetes learned from Borg, I think the end result is significantly more valuable.