First, I agree with you. Redhat has no obligations here, and if they did increase their "charity" contibutions there are several areas that could use help. That said, it's not charity. They have an interest in keeping the desktop useful for developers who also do some free work for them. I would also argue that making Linux a first-rate desktop operating system would be incredibly beneficial to Redhat/IBM. They also shouldn't be the only ones working toward that, so keeping it minimal might be a good way to get others to contribute - weather paid by someone or not.

You make some fair points. It's not pure charity since RH does receive indirect benefits from it, but I'd still say it's mostly charity. Maybe you have specifics in mind, but the "free work" I can think of (open source upstreams) is something that equally benefits RH competitors. It's more of a "rising tide lifts all boats" sort of thing. So while RH does receive some benefit from it, it still seems largely charitable to me.

RH doesnt really have competitors at the moment. None of comparable size anyway, and that's prior to IBM. Microsoft seems to be interested though.

Go big or go home?

> It's already largely a charitable service to the community.

Now that they have a deal with Lenovo to have Fedora preinstalled on their P-series laptops, I do think they have a vested interest in creating a market-worthy workstation OS.

I just hope people won't be writing in about it, "Nice try, but palm rejection on the touchpad sucks camel's balls!"

It‘s a Thinkpad, who cares for the touch pad /s