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How to manage a closed source, high-risk project?

Secrets are no fun but sometimes they're necessary.

How to manage a closed source, high-risk project?
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abel is in the early stages of developing a closed-source financial app within a niche market. He is hiring his first employees, and he wants to take steps to ensure these new hires don't steal the code and run away. "I foresee disabling USB drives and DVD writers on my development machines," he writes. But will that be enough? Maybe a better question is: will that be too much?

See the original question here.

Trust goes a long way

ChrisF Answers (34 votes):

You need to trust your developers.

Virtually all professional developers won't steal your source. It's understood that if you work for somebody else, the employer own the code that you write. Devs might copy code for reference purposes, but it's highly unlikely they will offer it for sale to anyone else. Getting caught isn't worth the risk.



Who would buy on the black market?

Bob Murphy Notes (17 votes):


Related: "How to prevent code from leaking outside work?"

Find a third-party solution

Cliff (2 votes):




I can't comment to their effectiveness or appropriateness as I have limited experience with these solutions, but just thought that it might be helpful to point this out. Feel free to edit this answer with additional software solutions to data leaks.

Your employees are your real resource

GrandmasterB Answers (34 votes):



They can simply rewrite it in a fraction of the time it took to originally develop it. Yes, it's true, developers arent complete idiots... once they figure out how to do something, they can often remember how they did it.

So, I guess you're just going to have to trust them, or else write the software yourself.


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