GPL Issues

Hello Everyone. I'm going to embark on a project that will require me to butt heads with some high-level kahunas regarding Linux. I work for a very very big company that has enormous clout but is not as risk-taking as I would like them to be. Anyway my question is: If we decide to use a standard distribution of Linux, are we forced to publish our own source code if we statically or dynamically link to GPL libraries, use gcc to compile and use GPL header files? I'm getting different answers from different sources. We are not planning to change the kernel in any way. Maybe create our own drivers for proprietary hardware and install them at runtime. Can anyone shed a bit more light on this? TIA