Back in 2019, when IBM purchased Red Hat for a whopping $34 Billion dollars, many speculated what impact Big Blue would have on the world's largest Linux company.
Historically, Red Hat has been one of the most active contributors to not only the Linux Kernel... but to a wide variety of Desktop-focused Linux projects. From Network Manager to Libre Office.
Would Red Hat continue that investment, under the ownership of IBM, in the broader Linux ecosystem? Or would IBM take the proverbial axe to expenses focused on "Desktop Linux" usage?
It appears that we now have the answer to that question.
Earlier this year, Red Hat laid off 760 employees -- including the Project Manager of Fedora (Red Hat's "community" Linux distribution upon which Red Hat Enterprise Linux is based).
We now know that another one of those laid off was a person focused on contributing to and supporting the LibreOffice office suite.
Followed by this weeks announcement... that Red Hat would stop shipping LibreOffice entirely:
"We are pivoting away from work we had been doing on desktop applications and will cease shipping LibreOffice as part of RHEL."
That's right. Future versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux will not ship with LibreOffice. Or, presumably, any office suite at all.
Is that crazy? Yes. Yes, it is.
But it gets crazier. The annoucement continues:
"This also limits our ability to maintain it in future versions of Fedora."
You read that right.
There is a strong possiblity that IBM has just made it so future versions of both Red Hat Linux and Fedora Linux will not ship with a supported version of LibreOffice.
Many thoughts immediately swirl in my head:
- Red Hat has, historially, been one of the most active contributors to LibreOffice. What will this mean, long term, for development of the open source office suite?
- IBM axed the Fedora Project Manager and the key Libre Office maintainer? Should we expect more cuts were "Desktop Linux" is concerned?
- Red Hat Enterprise and Fedora Linux... without an office suite? What? How can you have a workstation system or desktop without an office suite? Is this IBM's way of saying that we should only use web browsers and nothing else?
- Is there a silver-lining? Could this mean that future Linux distributions will become lighter and leaner... with less pre-installed software? Doesn't seem likely.
IBM's changes to Red Hat -- and the Red Hat involvement in Linux -- have been coming fast and furious. My prediction? This is only the beginning.
Note: The news isn't all bad. Collabora has swooped in and hired the LibreOffice maintainer that was laid off -- which means that developer can continue working on LibreOffice at least to some degree. Though that doesn't help much for the future of LibreOffice on Red Hat or Fedora Linux.
