Zserio Frequently Asked Questions

How do I pronounce zserio?

Zserio is pronounced as one word with a silent s. Basically “zero” with an added “i”.

How can I contribute?

Make a pull request, write an issue. Regarding the copyright: we are working on something that takes care about this. We want to limit the copyright and legal stuff to its minimum, so we will probably need to add some CLA in the near future that will look similar to CLAs from companies like Facebook [1] or Google [2] [3].

Who is “Don Zserio”?

Don Zserio is a cartoon character that fights bloated data and is somehow a lonesome rider in today’s world where everyone throws JSON and XML onto each other and doesn’t care about bandwidth or mobile carrier costs.

Why are you bashing Google’s protobuf?

The only way to get smarter is by playing a smarter opponent. – Fundamentals of Chess (from the Guy Ritchie movie Revolver)

Actually we don’t. Protobuf is cool as it is, but zserio does go a little beyond what protobuf is offering. Of course you have to position yourself somehow and convince people that you are even better than something that is already doing a very similar thing.

We see zserio, protobuf and other binary serialization formats (that include a schema definition language) in line against the wasteful bloated text formats like XML and JSON.