Remote Developer - How do you avoid source code theft and manage production server access?

As as founder it is not uncommon to be paranoid about developer stealing your code to launch his own venture. Also giving production server access can also tricky. Of course, you could keep the access only to yourself but if you have multiple servers etc. it doesn't scale over long term and takes lot of your time.

This is particularly challenging when your developer is completely remote and taking legal actions half way across the world isn't something you would want to spend you time/money on.

Here is few things I tried:

• Only gave access to open source/non critical portions of code to the developer for the first year
• I gave my remote developer full production access after working together for 2 years. He is Finland and I am in from India . It seems to have worked for me till now. I felt giving extra responsibility to him has made him more closer to the company/team

Curious to hear your thoughts on this