Releasing fast Protocol Buffers for Python with lazy decoding support

Last week there was a discussion about Protocol Buffers for Python when Greplin released C++ wrappers. [<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2145534" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2145534</a>]<p>I mentioned that we were working on it too, so over the weekend I tried to make it usable by others.<p>Two main differences are:<p>1) Lazy decoding support: Message parts are decoded on the fly as they are accessed for first time.<p>2) No dependencies. C code is generated which compiles to Python module.

This is great news. The company I am currently working at is using the Google Protocol buffers within Python as well, and any and all speedups we can get is absolutely fantastic.<p>As of right now we are just getting off the ground and I don't think the protocol buffers are going to be our primary concern for a while, either way it is nice to know that in the future we can look forward to using these 3rd party libraries.

Does anyone have the TL;DR version of what PBs are or how they're used?

Is anyone pushing these updates back to google? Isn't protobufs open source?