It could very well be that IBM would have asked with or without SCO making a fool of itself. Remember: IBM is huge and have been in business longer than pretty much any other "high tech" company. They have a very well-defined way of doing business. Checking on the copyright status of Free Software projects before they write significant code based on it seems a reasonable thing for them to do, even if SCO wasn't making noise.
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Note: All code is untested, unless otherwise stated
