Last month the promised head-on collision between Oracle and the European Commission ended not with a bang, but with a whimper. This means in all likelihood that the EU will give its seal of approval to the Oracle-Sun merger quite soon — perhaps as early as Wednesday, January 20 — and almost certainly by the review deadline of January 27, which means that the merger will finally be complete in February at some point. That means that the Java community will finally get a chance to see what Java’s new corporate parent will look like.And the first prediction is that it will be smaller — much smaller — with a UBS analyst guessing that almost half of Sun employees will be let go. John Paczkowski over at All Things Digital won’t commit to such terrifying numbers, but he does outline the fact that Oracle is prepared to pull the trigger quickly on its planned layoffs, with VP- and officer-level folks getting a very generous severance, and other people presumably, um, not.The thing that really interests me, obviously, is how many of these cuts will happen in Sun’s various Java divisions. Oracle is very keen on Java, of course — but it’s also keen on making money, something Java hasn’t really done in a direct way for Sun. The cuts will quickly tell the story of how exactly Oracle hopes to use Java as a tool for its profit, and that story should be an interesting one. Of course, we maybe shouldn’t be counting our chickens just yet; MySQL’s founders are still fighting onto prevent the merger, and, having apparently failed in Europe, are now looking to Russia or China to block the deal. Technology Industry