Red Hat Inc. lost close to a quarter of its market capitalisation last week after Oracle Corp. declared its intentions of lending technical support to Red Hat solutions for half the price offered by the company.

Oracle will offer bug fixes, maintenance and support with steep discounts to enterprises that use Red Hat Linux. Red Hat stands to lose marketshare as its business model relies heavily on support. Red Hat and Novell Inc. provide standardised versions of Linux and sell maintenance, upgrades and technical support services for their Linux distributions.

Analysts had expected Oracle to enter the Linux market using the Open Source code but the company’s move has made a bigger splash than anticipated.

The discounts offered by Oracle may run a-foul of US anti-trust laws if they are deemed predatory. However, such cases are difficult to bring to closure as US courts typically view price cutting as facilitating competition. The courts would view a price cut as predatory only if it were proved that the move made no business sense except to drive a rival firm out of business.

Red Hat Inc. has decided not to cut its prices for Linux support contracts for enterprises. Watch this space!

The UK-based East Coast train operator Great North Eastern Railway (GNER) has completed deploying wireless Internet access across its fleet. This was achieved seven months ahead of schedule.

Eleven diesel trains and 30 electric trains have been covered by this deployment. With the current wireless deployment, GNER now has the world’s largest fleet of wireless equipped trains. The project was scheduled and expected to be completed by May 2007 but it was brought forward on account of customer demand. The entire project came to about 3.2 million pounds.

Passengers on GNER trains can now on surf the Internet or check and reply to e-mail without interruptions. The solution and service offered is expected to appeal to business class passengers who prefer to work while travelling.

GNER trains send and receive communications via a combination of a roof-mounted satellite dish and mobile phone antenna apart from using 3G or GPRS technology. Each coach along the entire length of the train is further connected via the on-board wireless network. This creates a Wi-Fi hotspot in every coach. The service is offered on all GNER journeys, including its longest route from London to Inverness, a distance of 580 miles.

A Web site for bovine farmers in the European Union called farmwizard.com is offering livestock data, including cattle movements and health records that can be integrated with other relevant databases such as the government’s cattle tracing system.

Farmers who subscribe to this service are offered handhelds by the company so that they can input data directly from the field and synchronise it with the FarmWizard database. Farmers have to maintain records on animal movements, vet details and feed stock information for quality assurance purposes and also because of EU-wide rules.

Previously, the process followed by farmers would be to note down the relevant details on paper and transfer the same to a computer at the end of the day. Currently about 50 farmers have received the iAnywhere devices, and another 450 will get them over the coming months.

The solution offers benefits such as fewer errors and more accurate data collection in breeding management. FarmWizard harnesses the power of the network and allows farmers to trade information and ideas with other farmers from all over the world.

Farmers wishing to use FarmWizard need to pay an annual fee for the service that comes with access to a range of useful agri IT business tools and record-keeping functionality.

After all these years, many organisations are still on COBOL though others are preparing to jump ship. The New York Stock Exchange is not alone in this regard. Of 352 respondents to a recent Computerworld survey of IT managers, 218 or 62 percent informed that they use COBOL. Of those 218, 36 percent said that they plan to gradually migrate from it while 25 percent would do so if it weren’t for the expense of rewriting all that code.

COBOL has been around since 1960 and is rugged, well suited for batch-processing and practically self-documenting. However, it is also a procedural language in an object-oriented world. While it is well suited to batch operations, the language is not as good a fit for developing interactive applications or Web-based front ends as .NET or J2EE.

Furthermore, it has an image problem. Outside the mainframe data centre, COBOL is viewed by most Java, Visual Basic and C# programmers as an obsolete and inferior language. Besides COBOL programs are written to extend or support existing applications on mainframes and other back-end systems to accommodate IT acquisitions.

Acer has declared that it will not recall notebooks on account of the fact that a marginal number of Acer notebooks use Sony batteries. Acer claims that its battery-charging mechanism will not have problems following quality checks.

Sony’s battery woes began in August when Dell recalled about 4.1 million notebook batteries due to a potential fire hazard caused by Sony-made lithium-ion battery cells that had been damaged during production. Following this, other companies including Apple Computer, Lenovo Group, and Toshiba recalled notebook batteries made by Sony.

Sony has announced that the final replacement figure could reach around 9.6 million laptop batteries and over 8.1 million batteries have been recalled since mid-August.

Hewlett-Packard has claimed that it has started to earn profits from Open Source software vis-a-vis proprietary software in some instances, largely on account of the support costs associated with migration.

This announcement that HP is realising greater profits from OSS will add fuel to the debate on the actual cost of ownership of Open Source.

It was observed that organisations that migrate to OSS from a Microsoft environment mostly need greater training and support than those moving from Unix.

In spite of all the benefits, persuading an organisation to adopt OSS remains a challenge. HP is still urging business to embrace OSS as it claims that the market for non-proprietary standards is growing fast especially in the telecommunications and government sectors.