Other git hosts are also getting scraped, and have had to implement counters because of it. For example, this is the kind of thing Codeberg shows crawlers. I’ve even seen people who self-host complaining about getting overloaded because of bots scraping their forge

For me, and a few other projects I checked, it only has non-GPL repos. But it also does not have everything that isn’t GPL, despite the repos being much older than the cut-off date. But it does have repos without a license, which they are simply not allowed to copy.

I wonder if those repos have been deduplicated, and one of the forks (on some other person’s account) is included instead. Unfortunately you can only search the first 5M records via the website, and I don’t have time to play around with the API at the moment, so I could neither confirm nor deny that possibility

If nobody owns the code, then then nobody can enforce the terms of the license it was released under, and free software under the FSF definition becomes impossible. All you have is public domain.

For example, a company could take the Linux kernel, modify it and distribute it with their gadgets. And they could simply not release the modifications they’ve made, as is required by the GNU Public License. But nobody would be able to do anything about it. Currently, copyright laws allow the people who wrote the Linux kernel to sue the company for breaking the license and violating the authors’ copyrights