> As of January 2023, GitHub reported having over 100 million developers and more than 372 million repositories, including at least 28 million public repositories

If there are ~350 million private repos then they'd only need to be worth an average of $30 each to be worth a billion dollars in total. Which doesn't seem farfetched.

Considering the looooong tail of these repos are forks with no changes, sample code, toy projects abandoned after a single commit, etc. etc., I'd say it's pretty far fetched.

For proof, try searching for a mundane string in GH Code search. The vast majority of repos you see will be basically garbage.

I think that is incredibly farfetched. If you got access to 1,000 random private Github repos, I don't think you could sell them, or otherwise utilize them for anywhere near that value, if anything.

A better way of quantifying this would be to look at the impact of real life source code leaks. I'm not aware of any significant monetization of the windows source leak, for example.

You've also got to factor in all the software that relies on projects developed primarily on GitHub.