Those are mind-boggling numbers.
Although I kind of doubt that "almost every" engineer has access to the entire repo, especially when it comes to the search ranking stuff.
Although I kind of doubt that "almost every" engineer has access to the entire repo, especially when it comes to the search ranking stuff.
When we're not talking about the sensitive stuff, there's not much magic to what many engineers write every day, it's the same "glue technology X to technology Y" stuff you see everywhere, so I don't think there's any value to hiding that in the name of secrecy.
> (...) all 2 billion lines sit in a single code repository available to all 25,000 Google engineers.
The most famous corporate trade secret, the Coke formula, was stolen by two employees who attempted to sell it to Pepsi. Pepsi alerted Coke, the companies worked together to bring in the FBI, and both employees went to prison: http://www.cnn.com/2007/LAW/05/23/coca.cola.sentencing/
"There are limitations this system. Potvin says certain highly sensitive code—stuff akin to the Google’s PageRank search algorithm—resides in separate repositories only available to specific employees."