Protocol Buffers is not proprietary. It is open source under the BSD license. Here is the source code: github.com/google/protobuf. It is very much an open proto

Protocol Buffers is not proprietary. It is open source under the BSD license. Here is the source code: github.com/google/protobuf. It is very much an open protocol, and anyone is free to write their own implementation of it. It is just a standards-based protocol. If your organization values the existence of a standard over technical excellence, then there is no use in convincing you. Otherwise, in terms of ease of use, performance, tooling, and human readability and writability, Protocol Buffers is superior to XML-based protocols (since the API for converting between the binary and text formats is extremely simple to use). As a fun fact, if you really wanted to use XML as a wire format, you could even write an XmlFormat ser/de for Protocol Buffers, similar to the JsonFormat that is already provided, but then it would defeat one of the main purposes of using Protocol Buffers in the first place because you would replace an extremely performant wire format with an extremely sub-optimal one.