My company recently had a number of offshore contractors leave the company, to a direct competitor, possibly taking a decent amount of source code with them. This has caused the company leadership to be very scared about IP protection, and have asked me to investigate improving the security of our code.
Unfortunately I am of the belief that trying to protect code, from programmers is pretty much impossible, since the whole point is for the programmers to read/write the code.
however, for the sake of due dilligence, I am sending out a bleg. What are good best practices for controlling source, within a company? My boss wants to do things like restrict access on a per-file/unit of work in TFS (possible, but lots of overhead issues), watermark sourcecode (whitespace? dependancy whitespacing?), and lots of other ideas that I don't think are feasible.
But, anyone out there have any solutions in this space?
Print | posted on Wednesday, September 03, 2008 11:26 AM