I've often joked that the companies I work for should give their source code to their competitors. By the time the competitors figure it out, our company will

I've often joked that the companies I work for should give their source code to their competitors. By the time the competitors figure it out, our company will be so far ahead :-) It is interesting to speculate on the value of source code, though. For Tesla autopilot I'm more than willing to accept that there is some "secret sauce" of trade secrets in there that would help out a competitor, but usually I find that source code contains the most mundane stuff. Most professionals could write it nearly as fast as they could learn to work with the legacy systems if they knew what they were building. Instead it's the requirements that are gold. You figure out exactly what needs to be built in a great amount of detail, then you are at least as well off as having it big ball of messy logic. Take note those that want to "steal" a competitor's project: just buy a copy of the executable and start figuring out exactly what it does ;-) BTW, as a (on topic) side note, I once had an ex-colleague tell me that they copied all of the source code for every company they ever worked for -- just so they could look stuff up. It is not completely implausible that an ex-employee would copy the code to help their own performance without any involvement of their new employer.