How much risk is exposing all the sources to a third party?
data-recovery, language-agnostic, security, source-code-protection
Solution
The Drake Equation states that
N = R * d * p * e * c * x * y * z
where
N is the probability that doing this will result in the bankruptcy of your company, leaving you and all your co-workers unemployed and starving.
R is the number of hard drives discarded every year without first being erased
d is the fraction of those hard drives that are fished out of dumpsters
p is the fraction of recovered drives that are ever plugged in and fired up
e is the number of such drives that are subsequently listed on eBay because their contents look interesting
c is the number of competitors you have who browse eBay looking for trade secrets
x is the probability that your discarded drive contains something they can use
y is the probability that they do actually use that information
z is the probability that their use of such information ruins your company.
To estimate the risk that someone will work out it was you and sue/prosecute you for the damage you caused, calculate
(N / t) * m
where t is the number of people on your team, and m is the number of managers who are paying enough attention to work out who did what.
If you can prove that any of the coefficients involved is zero, then your strategy is risk-free. Otherwise there's a very small chance you'll bankrupt your company, starve your colleagues and end up in jail.
Problem
I've been arguing with a co-worker about how necessary it is to wipe or destroy the hard disks that were used for storing the sources and are replaced with bigger ones or discarded. His point is that no piece of source code exposed to a third party gives that party any competitive advantage. My point is that it only takes ten minutes to set up a wiping program and start it before leaving and in the morning you have a disk that contains no data that could be possibly recovered - doesn't hurt and compeletely removes the risk. Now really how risky is it to throw away a hard drive containing a working copy of a repository of a commercial product having 10 million lines of source code?