IBM is almost sure to buy rival Sun Microsystems for $7 billion or at $9.50 per share.

This deal has been going on for an extremely long time, from IBM combing through Sun’s contracts and licensing deals to IBM decreasing its bid from $10 a share to $9.50. It finally seems to be drawing to a close, and if the deal is sealed (which The New York Times’ sources claim is almost sure to go through) IBM will have market dominance in UNIX-based servers.

Sun has been struggling for a large amount of time financially, but many people will be said to see the creators of Java, MySQL, and the Solaris operating system go. Many also question whether Solaris will survive the takeover. More worryingly however is that with Sun under IBM control, only Fujitsu and HP are left in a UNIX market that is dominated by IBM.