During my last talk at FOSDEM 2008 research room on "open research issues toward a legal framework for open source software", I have got question about Freedom restriction induced by tools like Fossology.
Since Richard Stallman used copyright law as an instrument to grant some fundamental freedoms, leading to "copyleft", we all know that legal constraints can be useful and part of the open source success story.
Even if the GNU GPL is still the most frequent OS licence, it was clear since the begin with BSD and LGPL like licences, that many others exploitation scheme were relevant. Therefore, availability of tools helping open source communities and software editors to check IP status of component included is good for OSS, making sure they are not infringing IPR of other OSS projects. Moreover, proprietary software editors can no longer say they didn't know, or were not able to known they were using OSS software.
From the project management point of view, using tools like fossology, will become as obvious as choosing a licence for an OSS project, even if governance and collaborative model issues are still open and have to be studied. At INRIA*, in close connection with its consortium, we start using fossology for Scilab (http://www.scilab.org) helping development team to localize exogenous components and to update headers for the 20 000 files of the next release.
Improve trust in legal situation of OSS, using tools like fossology and appropriate methodologies, is probably a mid term challenge for the whole open source community.
* INRIA (http://www.inria.fr), is the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control. Involving more than 3000 scientists throughout its eight research centres, INRIA is dedicated to fundamental and applied research in information and communication science and technology (ICST).