Red Hat To Stop Shipping LibreOffice In Future RHEL, Limiting Fedora LO Involvement

Red Hat has decided they will be doing less work on desktop applications and will stop shipping LibreOffice as part of a future Red Hat Enterprise Linux release (presumably RHEL10). This is also limiting Red Hat's engagement in working on LibreOffice packaging for Fedora while the hope is that the Flatpak'ed LibreOffice will fill the void.

Prominent Red Hat employee and GNOME developer Matthias Clasen shared that the LibreOffice RPMs have been orphaned and the decision to stop shipping LibreOffice in RHEL in the future and in term limiting the scope of their contributions to Fedora.

Red Hat's Display Systems team has been working on Wayland improvements, HDR support on the Linux desktop, and other key work to benefit workstation users. However, the "tradeoff" to focusing on that is they will be pivoting away from less desktop application work and "cease shipping LibreOffice as part of RHEL starting in a future RHE version. This also limits our ability to maintain it in future versions of Fedora."

Clasen went on to note that they will still maintain LibreOffice in RHEL 7/8/9 with necessary security fixes for the lifetime of those releases. They will also be working to upstream some improvements to LibreOffice to see that it works better as a Flatpak.

Any community contributor to Fedora can step-up to maintain the LibreOffice RPMs if so desired, but it's a big undertaking given the size of the Microsoft Office competitor and the number of dependencies. Ultimately they are putting LibreOffice in the Flatpak basket as the way to leverage this open-source office suite moving forward.

More details on this Fedora devel list thread.