Antivirus and security firms that serve enterprise and government customers on occasion disclose their source code to acquire lucrative contracts.
Ask a chief executive of any security company what the crown jewel of their business is, and they'll tell you it's the source code.
In a day and age of government spying, hackers, and backdoors, there's a great deal of mistrust and paranoia in the tech industry.
Governments particularly are on edge that other states are using tech firms to get access to their most critical systems and data, including the US government, which has been shown to
conduct industrial espionage (despite its claims that it doesn't).
It's no surprise that this air of deception has led some countries, like
Russia as far back as 2003, and more recently
China, to seek access to source code in order to approve or certify products in their countries.
"No, we refuse to hand over source code," said Vince Steckler, chief executive of Avast, in an hour-long conversation in our New York newsroom late last month.
