Selling a company: How to let the buyer safely evaluate the source code?
Someone is interested in buying a web startup I built. Subject of the deal is the running service, including domain, database content and of course source code.

While progressing further into negotiations, the buyer wants to have "access to our servers" for "code review".

The person I'm talking with is not technically skilled, so I understand that his words sounds a bit misleading about what they are trying to do.

However, I'm wondering what the standard procedure is to complete such a deal. I understand that the buyer doesn't want to buy a pig in a poke, but of course I also don't want to give away my source code before the deal is completed. The project itself was developed with Ruby on Rails and is nicely documented and backed by unit tests, so I have nothing to hide from a QA standpoint.

* How do I deal with such a situation?
* How to select code samples to send him, and what extent should they have?
* Names/terms (what is this procedure even called?), links to blogs/literature related to this are highly appreciated!

Selling a company: How to let the buyer safely evaluate the source code?
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Someone is interested in buying a web startup I built. Subject of the deal is the running service, including domain, database content and of course source code.

While progressing further into negotiations, the buyer wants to have "access to our servers" for "code review".

The person I'm talking with is not technically skilled, so I understand that his words sounds a bit misleading about what they are trying to do.

However, I'm wondering what the standard procedure is to complete such a deal. I understand that the buyer doesn't want to buy a pig in a poke, but of course I also don't want to give away my source code before the deal is completed. The project itself was developed with Ruby on Rails and is nicely documented and backed by unit tests, so I have nothing to hide from a QA standpoint.

* How do I deal with such a situation?
* How to select code samples to send him, and what extent should they have?
* Names/terms (what is this procedure even called?), links to blogs/literature related to this are highly appreciated!
