As I see it, Gmane is a stateless website/nntp server, plus a data archive of public data (copyright law notwithstanding, since Lars never worried about it like

As I see it, Gmane is a stateless website/nntp server, plus a data archive of public data (copyright law notwithstanding, since Lars never worried about it like Yahoo Groups/Oath apparently worries about now). I don't think Lars was protective of his server software IP, right? And he didn't sell Gmane for money, right? Is there any reason there weren't 2 or 3 variations of it, run separately, as backups? When Lars agreed to hand it over, why not put out a call to the public to clone it? Isn't the point of NNTP in the first place: a decentralized news archive?