question about MPL

[john smith]

Hallo, there is a chance that a software library of ours 
will be released as open-source. We want to strike a balance
between the needs of die-hard free software programmers
and the needs of third-parties who would like to integrate our
software with their own without too much trouble.
The goal is large adoption by developers and industry alike.
For this reason, the MPL (Mozilla Public License) seems to be
the one that makes most sense.

Unfortunately, there is a potential third-party integrator
that does not seem to be too happy with MPL. Their arguments:

===========================================================
The primary concern is that in order to satisfy contractual 
conditions with certain key customers we have to indemnify 
both ourselves and them against IPR liability, and the more 
code shipments (including code snippets/drivers etc) we make, 
the more it costs.  This insurance is very expensive because 
the the potential liability is high and the risk is hard to 
quantify.  Releasing source code as required would actually 
cost us quite a lot of money (for a relatively small company).

The secondary issue is that there might be some IP concerns 
for us in releasing code for modifications needed to integrate 
the softwareX code with the softwareY code.  
Such modifications could be very specific, so they might 
reveal details about the internals that we would not want 
to make public.  This is however, a lesser concern because 
we could mitigate it by performing any needed modifications 
in a neutral way.
===========================================================

Some question:
- is this a common case?

- should we be thinking of a dual license for developers and 
  third parties? (we don't think this is wise for a few reasons)

- should we create a modified version of MPL for the purpose?
  how? how would deelopers react to yet another OS license?

ideas and opinions are welcome.

thank you

John
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