According to spokespeople for the two companies a report on Sunday evening in the Wall Street Journal, the much-rumored and never-admitted merger talks between IBM and Sun Microsystems appear to have hit an impasse.

No kidding. Huh.

The details are sketchy, and the two companies are not confirming or denying that something is going down, but the Wall Street Journal broke a story last Tuesday, right smack dab in the middle of the opening session of Sun Microsystems' CommunityOne East developer conference in New York, that IBM was in talks to shell out between $7.4 billion and $8.2 billion to acquire Sun.

Someone has floated a trial balloon, through a leak to the Wall Street Journal, that IBM is in “talks” to buy Sun Microsystems for $6.5 billion. The only party that would leak this information is Sun itself, and it smacks of desperation in trying to thwart an unwanted acquisition, or to positively impact another deal that Sun is weak in.

When Walt Mossberg talks, people listen. He's the big tech writer at the Wall Street Journal, and ... having the WSJ report on Linux and Ubuntu is huge.

Sun Microsystems passed away on July 16, 2009. On that day, the company's shareholders voted to accept the merger agreement, proposed by Oracle, to purchase the company for US$5.6 billion, or $9.50 per share.

Monty Widenius, founder of the MySQL open-source database business, whose fate held up Oracle’s $7.4bn purchase of Sun Microsystems for months last year, has filed an appeal against the decision by European competition authorities to clear the merger. The European Commission said it was aware of the appeal, filed with the European courts in Luxembourg, but did not yet know the grounds.

OpenOffice.org Conference 2008 -- Beijing, China -- 05 Nov 2008: IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) today announced the launch of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) Toolkit Union, a new open-source software community project organized to make document software more innovative, versatile and useful for business.

Reports surfaced late this evening that computing giant IBM — which has been in talks for some time to buy Sun Microsystems — has pulled its $7 billion offer to buy the struggling company.

Intel is rolling out a new line of Atom chips, which power most Netbooks, for mobile devices. With Android moving into Netbooks, you can expect a merger between the Netbook and mobile form factor very soon.