Right, but other sites scrape that free info and republish it with the goal of drawing traffic. Apparently, Stack Overflow has an API. I don't know the functionality of their API, but it doesn't matter: via API or web scraping, the content of the SO database is all over the web, yet SO is thriving.

You said "other sites scrape that free". I agree that info is all over the web but it isn't scraped, and I don't think you should keep calling it scraping.

Yet there seem to be people who use their data to make a bit of money on the side. I haven't had time to do so, but I wanted to ask SO if the translated SO pages on humbug.in/stackoverflow are against any rules. He punches their pages trough googles translate and stuffs them full with banners.

Nearly drove me nuts because a friend who I was working on a project with kept searching in german. As a result he got the terribly translated pages first followed by the actual SO pages.