As someone who manages commercial software development projects (also for embedded devices) I can tell you that it is a royal pain to manage the copyright notices. It is a list that has to be created, maintained, updated and has to make its way into the final product or its documentation. You also have to manage copyright notices from software shipped by your partners.
While you do this, your programmers will just drop in another library ("But I've checked the license, it's fine, it's BSD!") without telling you. And that library will have dependencies.
Overall, if you want to do this right, it's a major pain, for very little actual gain (who reads these copyright notices anyway?).
If you have any other recommendations for making this process smoother, please let me know. I want people in your situation to be able to use my libraries without these irritations. (Author of the post.)
The only thing that comes to mind is a unified standard for copyright statements. If I could be sure that there is a file called COPYRIGHT.statement in every source repo, containing a single line of text that I should include in the documentation, it would be a huge step forward.
Unfortunately, this would require agreeing on a standard and having people follow it, so I'm not keeping my hopes up.
Don't you already have rules related to common licenses like MIT, BSD, LGPL or GPL? Also wouldn't putting all the notices in a common directory and concatenating them at the end be enough? For example the webkitgtk-1.10.2 package (from Fedora 18) has the following files:
No doubt a bit of a pain, but clearly it's manageable and something the industry has come to grips with, because it seems like every random device I own has some menu somewhere that gives you a lonnnnnnng list of FOSS copyrights...
While you do this, your programmers will just drop in another library ("But I've checked the license, it's fine, it's BSD!") without telling you. And that library will have dependencies.
Overall, if you want to do this right, it's a major pain, for very little actual gain (who reads these copyright notices anyway?).