Who owns what you build?

The customer does. Every version, adapter, corpus, record, and page of documentation produced during an engagement belongs to the customer and stays on the customer's appliance. E31 Consulting keeps no copy, holds no access after handoff, and does not reuse what was built for one customer in work for another.

Why the answer is simple

Ownership follows from where the work is done. The practice builds on the customer's Czar, inside the customer's posture, from the first version. Nothing is prototyped in a vendor's cloud and moved in later. Nothing is taken out for the engineers' convenience. On an air-gapped site, there is no way to take anything out; on a connected site, the engineers use only the systems the customer already secures and leave nothing open.

Because the artefacts were never anywhere but the customer's hardware, there is nothing the practice could own. The question of ownership does not have to be negotiated at the end because the situation on the ground has already settled it.

What the list includes

The published version and every earlier version, each with its operating picture inside it. The corpus the agent reads and the organisation given to it. Any adapters produced by adapting a model on the site's own material. The run record from the first test case onward. The notes written for the operators and any design documentation the engineers produced. These are enumerated in what the customer keeps.

Czar Chassis and products under your name

When the result ships under the customer's own name, the same answer holds and matters more. The product the customer's customers run is the customer's product: its versions, its adapters, its documentation, its record. The practice built it; the customer owns it, ships it, and changes it. There is no mark of the practice on it and no dependency on the practice to maintain it.

What the customer does not own

The practice's methods, meaning the way certified engineers work, remain the practice's. They are how the work is done, not something that is delivered. Likewise the platform itself, Substrate and Agency on Czar, is held under the appliance subscription and is not something an engagement transfers. What is built on the platform is the customer's; the platform is the customer's to use under its subscription.

Adapters and anything learned on site

Customers sometimes ask specifically about adapters, because they are produced partly by the engineers and partly from the site's data. The answer is the same. An adapter made on the customer's appliance from the customer's material is the customer's. The practice does not carry it to another site and does not keep a reference copy.

After handoff

Ownership does not change when the site team publishes new versions, or when the practice returns for a scoped next version. Each new engagement begins from what the customer already holds and ends with the customer holding more. The practice leaves no path out behind it, so there is never a moment at which something built on site is anywhere but on site.