2023-06-07 15:43:05
|
Red Hat will no longer develop the LibreOffice RPMs for either RHEL or Fedora – the specialists who worked on them will receive completely new tasks. The SUSE developers followed the same path 10 years ago. Users will have to either download RPM packages from the LibreOffice developers site, but only for X86 and X64, or run packages from the program through the Flatpak sandbox – this is the alternative officially voiced by Red Hat.
Opt out of LibreOffice
Red Hat, an IBM-controlled company, has decided to stop supplying RPM packages with LibreOffice office software for the RHEL Linux distribution for corporations (Red Hat Enterprise Linux). This was stated personally Matthias Klassen (Matthias Clasen), Fedora Desktop Team Leader and member of the GNOME Release Team.
The changes will take effect with the release of the build of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10, the date of which has not yet been determined. As of June 7, 2023, the newest version of RHEL was 9.2 dated May 10, 2023.
As for Fedora, Red Hat’s Linux distribution for the general public, that will be updated as well. The company intends to drastically reduce its participation in the development of LibreOffice packages for this OS.
Optimization of working hours, and nothing more
As the official reason for the loss of interest in the development of LibreOffice packages, writes The Register, Red Hat cites its desire to revise the tasks performed by company employees. In particular, this will affect the specialists of the Red Hat Display Systems team – it was they who worked on the LibreOffice packages for both RHEL and Fedora.
Red Hat has made life easier for itself and its employees, but it may have made it harder for users
In fact, the members of this group will take care of their direct responsibilities, including integrating HDR support into distributions and optimizing support for the Wayland protocol, the brainchild of a former Red Hat employee, on both OSes. Christian Hosberg (Kristian Hogsberg), which has been developed since 2008. This protocol is used to organize a graphical server in Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems. In a word, the priorities of the Red Hat Display Systems team have changed, and now instead of LibreOffice packages they will develop, among other things, color management mechanisms for Red Hat operating systems.
Personnel problem
At the end of April 2023, CNews wrote regarding the upcoming mass layoffs at Red Hat – the management planned to leave almost 800 people without work and assured that it would be mainly administrative staff, and that the layoffs would not affect developers.
According to The Register, the refusal to develop LibreOffice packages for RHEL and Fedora is not a consequence of these layoffs, although they did lead to massive calls for unionization. However, the publication’s experts are sure that the true reason lies precisely in the personnel issue, or rather, in one particular Red Hat employee, now a former one.
Not so long ago, the ranks of Red Hat left the lead maintainer Caolan McNamara (Caolan McNamara) who was directly involved in the development of LibreOffice packages for Fedora and RHEL. He left to work for Collabora, the company that is the key developer of LibreOffice.
The end does not justify the means
Another potential reason for Red Hat not doing more work on the LibreOffiice packages is the excessive amount of resources invested in them. User of the Hacker News portal under a pseudonym lyu07282 commented on the changes in Red Hat policy as follows: “Libre office is one huge incomprehensible pile of ancient rotting code in C ++ and Java, developed for more than 38 years (since StarOffice – approx. CNews)” (Libre office is one massive incomprehensible pile of ancient rotting c++ and java code dragged along over 38 years). In other words, building LibreOffice packages requires significant resources due to the large amount of dependencies.
Sergey Vasiliev, OTEKO-Digital: Data Lake will be created in the Black Sea port
by
At the same time, according to The Register, not all RHEL and Fedora users need all the features available in LibreOffice – most of them would be more than enough and 20% of their current number.
Possible alternatives
In order not to leave users completely without the opportunity to work in LibreOffice, the developers of RHEL and Fedora offered them an alternative. This office suite can be installed and run in the Flatpack sandbox, which exists under both distributions and allows you to run programs without being integrated into the operating system.
But there is another alternative, perhaps more convenient and easier for many users. Directly from the official website of the Open Document Foundation, which unites LibreOffice developers, you can download RPM packages from LibreOffice, at least for x86-64, which are updated relatively quickly. At the time of the release of the material, a stable build of the package with LibreOffice 7.5.3 was available for download, dated May 4, 2023.
By the way, Red Hat’s refusal to work on LibreOffice packages is not the first such case. In September 2013, SUSE, the developer of the Linux distribution of the same name, did the same, following which the entire team that worked on LibreOffice RPM packages went to work for the mentioned company Collabora.
Georgy Dorofeev
1686159138
#LibreOffice #kicked #Red #Hat #Linux #Users #left #free #replacement #Office
