westfw, I've had a similar experience at another large company that I've worked for. We wanted to switch from a proprietary compiler to gcc but tha lawyers had to check that it wouldn't "infect" our proprietary code. It turned out to be okay, of course, but the lawyers were always really worried about the open source licenses.
Personally, any code I'm not paid to write I want it to be truly free, which is why I've always been a strong proponent of BSD and BSD-oid licenses, though I completely understand and respect the GPL people.