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Fill in the Legal Questionnaire

Time: ~15 minutes for Part 1; a few minutes per module for Part 2. Roles: Project Manager or Compliance Manager (Part 1); the same role or a Developer familiar with the module's distribution (Part 2).

The Legal Questionnaire is the guided way to fill the settings that drive TrustSource's obligation engine. When you complete it, the engine knows enough about your project's commercial framing and each module's distribution to decide which licence obligations apply — attribution, source disclosure, copyleft, and the rest.

The Questionnaire has two parts:

  • Part 1 — Project level. Mostly commercial questions (distribution model, IP protection intent). The answers apply to every module in the project by default, so you only fill this part once per project.
  • Part 2 — Module level. Distribution-specific questions per module (how it is integrated, whether it is modified, whether it is shipped standalone or embedded). You fill this per module, though most modules of a well-scoped project share the same answers and can inherit from a template.

You reach both parts through the same Wizard button on the Legal tab of the respective settings screen.

Part 1 — the project-level questions

  1. Open the project.
  2. Go to Settings → Legal.
  3. Click Wizard. The Wizard walks you through the same fields you would otherwise fill directly on the tab:
  4. Commercial Aspects (CA) — how the software is distributed (usage fee, deployment fee, per-copy fee, or none of these).
  5. Operating Model (OM) — the default integration mode for modules that don't override it.
  6. IP Protection — whether licences without an explicit contributor grant should be flagged.
  7. IP Enforcement — whether licences that terminate on legal defence should be flagged.
  8. Click Save. Obligations are recomputed for every module that inherits from the project defaults.
  9. Optional but recommended: click Propagate to push the new settings to modules that had older values.

Part 2 — the module-level questions

For each module whose distribution differs from the project default (e.g. a small internal library that is not shipped to customers, inside a project whose default is "shipped"):

  1. Open the module.
  2. Go to Settings → Legal.
  3. Click Wizard. The module Wizard focuses on distribution-shape questions — is the module linked or embedded, modified, delivered as source or binary, and so on.
  4. Click Save. Obligations for this module are recomputed against the module's own answers rather than the project default.

If in doubt, do not override — the project default is usually right for the majority of modules.

What happens under the hood

The Wizard's answers are stored on the Legal tab as structured settings. When you save, TrustSource hands those settings, plus the licences of the module's components, to ts-legalcheck — an SMT-solver-backed obligation engine that deterministically computes which obligations apply. The result surfaces in the Obligations tab.

The engine is deterministic: given the same inputs it always returns the same obligation set. Two projects with identical Legal answers and identical component licences will yield identical obligations.

Background reading

An EACG Academy course on the Legal Questionnaire is planned; this recipe will link to it as soon as the course is live. Until then, the printed CGM Legal Questionnaire guide (PDF) and the three-part video walkthrough that were used to develop the course are available on request from support.