Documentation / QueryTek Review glossary / Framework Licensing
Framework licensing governs a customer's rights to use a review framework — its rubrics, criteria, and scoring method — beyond the engagement that produced it. It matters because the framework is reusable intellectual property, distinct from the review outcomes a customer buys.
A mature review framework is a substantial asset: dimensions that discriminate on real material, level descriptions two reviewers apply consistently, and severity weightings reflecting actual consequence. It represents accumulated work that generalises past any single engagement.
That creates a question a review contract has to answer. Review outcomes — scorecards, annotations, findings — plainly belong to the customer. The framework used to produce them is a different asset, and whether the customer may reuse it is a commercial term rather than an implication of having paid for the review.
Licensing typically distinguishes several rights.
Internal reuse. Whether the customer may apply the framework themselves, with their own reviewers, outside the engagement.
Derivation. Whether they may adapt it, and who owns the adaptation. Frameworks are usually refined in use, so this determines what happens to improvements.
Duration and survival. Whether rights continue after the engagement ends. A customer who has built a quality program around a framework has an operational dependency on it.
Onward provision. Whether the framework may be used for the customer's own clients, which is a materially different grant.
The practical failure is silence. A customer who assumes internal reuse and a provider who assumes engagement-only use will not discover the disagreement until the customer builds a program on the framework and the provider objects. Both positions are reasonable; only the ambiguity is a problem.
Where a framework encodes an external standard, that standard's own licensing applies independently. A framework built on a published standard cannot grant rights the underlying standard withholds.
Customers building an internal quality program need to know whether the framework they have been working with is theirs to continue using. The answer changes their planning, not just their contract.
Providers have the reciprocal interest: a framework given away implicitly is a reusable asset transferred without terms, and consistency across customers depends on controlling how it is adapted.
QueryTek Review treats review outcomes and the frameworks that produce them as distinct, with reuse, derivation, and duration rights addressed in the engagement agreement. Licensing terms are commercial matters handled through direct engagement.
