"Nothing"? Obviously that's untrue. There are many things stopping them. Professionalism, for example. There's "nothing" stopping someone at a job from printin

"Nothing"? Obviously that's untrue. There are many things stopping them. Professionalism, for example. There's "nothing" stopping someone at a job from printing every single one of their corporate emails and putting them into a binder to save forever, even after they've left the position. Nothing except professionalism, a sense of business ethics, the law, and the fact that it's a huge hassle. This seems like a problem that's not a problem. If you are working in a private repo then there should be some formalized arrangement on who owns the code and who doesn't, and that would be the originator of the private repo. If, for some reason, that relationship is less clear, then as you say other contributors can just create their own clones of the repo elsewhere. If the obvious relationship is one of collaborative ownership, then a public repo is the obvious choice.