Wait I don't get it, may be this can be explained to me. Actually you are saying that you bind the power of this developer to work on features that possibly will never be released due to license issues? Wouldn't it make much more sense to let this developer work on things that still have known issues/are unsupported, but can be released? And may be let him work on what he is doing now when your legal department has done its job to find out if you can release that work?
I mean, you yourself stated that manpower is not a resource that you have a vast amount of, so why are you wasting it?