The LWN article discusses this point:

> it was widely assumed at the time that SCO's real objective was to prod IBM into acquiring the company. That would have solved SCO's ongoing business problems and IBM, for rather less than the amount demanded in court, could have made an annoying problem go away and also lay claim to the ownership of Unix — and, thus, Linux. ...

> IBM, though, refused to play that game; the company had invested heavily into Linux in its early days and was uninterested in allowing any sort of intellectual-property taint to attach to that effort.

I shit on a lot that IBM does, but at the end of the day, I will always give them respect for what they did against SCO. If they rolled over, that would have given validity to SCO's claims and who knows where Linux would be today.

If you can win, why set that precedent? The negative result for SCO is very useful to the rest of society.