MIT meaning

This Practice Note considers the following commercial and legal issues arising from the use of free and open source software: What is free and open source software? History Upstreaming and forking Free and open source licences Distribution of modified works (and the reciprocal effect) Linking and incorporation Software as a service (SaaS) Compliance requirements Licence incompatibility Bare licence or contractual licence Patents Trade marks Corporate transactions Software bill of materials Software licensing to the end user Enforcement Free and open source software (sometimes called ‘FOSS’) is a collective term for software released under a licence granting recipients the rights to use, adapt, and share it—whether unchanged or modified—without fees or royalties, with the source code made available. In contrast, the software licences most familiar to lawyers may seek to stop the licensee from accessing source code, using the software across multiple users, locations or computers, and from making and...

While its prominence has dipped in recent years as developers opt for permissive licences like MIT, and notwithstanding the release of a newer edition—the GNU GPL 3.0—a large body of code is still governed by GPL 2.0. Alongside GNU GPL 3.0, it remains a contentious and much-debated licence, chiefly due to copyleft effects that clash with prevailing commercial software licensing models. Under GPL 2.0, any work that is distributed or made public which, in whole or in part, includes or is derived from the GPL programme, or any portion of it, must be licensed in its entirety, free of charge, to all third parties. Among other obligations, this means recipients must be permitted to copy, alter, and share the work, and the licensee must provide access to the source code. There is extensive argument about the events that trigger this clause. In particular, the scope of ‘distribute’ and the precise moment when software ‘contains or is derived from’ the GPL-covered code. This Practice Note reproduces the text of GPL 2.0...

The primary gateway question for any claim under a bilateral investment treaty (BIT), multilateral investment treaty (MIT) or foreign investment laws is whether the claimant truly qualifies as an ‘investor’ and whether its interests in the host state amount to an ‘investment’. If a prospective claimant is not a qualifying investor holding a qualifying investment under the relevant treaty or law, the substantive protections will not engage and there will be no lawful jurisdictional basis for pursuing investor–state arbitration. The definitions of ‘investor’ and ‘investment’ differ across BITs, yet common themes emerge and certain components recur. This Practice Note provides an overview of those themes and the typical issues arising around the definitions of ‘investor’ and ‘investment’. The meaning of investor An investor will typically be an individual citizen of the investor’s home state or a company incorporated in the investor’s home state (domicile). Nonetheless, with individuals holding multiple nationalities and multinational corporations, this question can be complex. Investor—key elements An investor can be a natural...