A large corporate sponsor that has done a terrible job of shepherding the protocol, maintaining docs, etc. I'm all for a community push to divorce the protobuf specification/implementation from Google and to have it be much more community maintained, as it's clear that Google doesn't seem to care to.

Google actually requested that the community contribute to a real specification. https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/issues/6188#issu...

So we've taken the initiative. No rent-seeking.

bufdev brought up some good concerns on that issue:

> This as a community project defeats the purpose of creating a definitive grammar/spec that protocolbuffers/protobuf holds itself to - without that component, having a community-written spec is no improvement over the current situation from what I can see, and in fact could create even more fragmentation and confusion, just my two cents.

It looks like the protobuf team created a repo intended for this (https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf-grammar), perhaps the spec could be contributed there, including a review/blessing from the official team.