This may not be the most technical question, but I was just interested, nonetheless...
How does a giant company like Google keep from having their code stolen by employees? Maybe I'm wrong, but I would assume that their source code to their search algorithms (amongst other things) would be valuable to their competitors (i.e. Microsoft).
I guess I can best phrase it like this:
What's keeping an unscrupulous employee who has sufficient clearance from accessing Google's code repository for a specific project and copying significant amounts of code to a flash drive and taking it to their competitors?
Fear of being sued?
Things within a company like Google are also compartmentalized. So not everybody has access to all code. If someone has access to code, you can bet that Google knows when they access it. I'm sure they have some kind of algorithm that looks and sees if somebody just downloads a lot of files very fast. The search algorithm isn't a small file obviously, it is a gigantic application.
All this would allow them to track who has stolen the code from within. There is also the fact that any self-respecting company or company with something to lose (i.e. Microsoft) would not take anything like this from somebody. They would probably even tell Google about it.