This was posted in an osnews.com comment on the topic of Ubuntu:
1. It’s a deliberate ploy to kill off Debian and supplant itself
2. There’s more to Ubuntu behind the scenes than what we know. I would not be surprised to see a Microsoft connection here to be honest.
3. Ubuntu was meant to remain free. If CNR costs money to subscribe to, it’s not free. Sure, the initial distro might be free, but it’s useless if you can’t update it. If Ubuntu moves totally to a CNR repository that costs money, and drops their free repositories that use apt-get/dpkg, and Debian is killed off, it won’t leave much room for a ‘free’ distro will it?
I was going to make fun of this, but I guess just reading it will suffice 
And for those who don’t know how the CNR / Ubuntu thing will work for us (#3), that has nothing to do with your regular updates to all the software you already have, or any software distributed with Ubuntu that resides in Ubuntu repositories.
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#1 by DjDarkman on February 10, 2007 - 5:44 pm
Ohh man some people acuse other poeple ,before knowing ,what`s up…
#2 by bvmou on February 11, 2007 - 5:54 am
I think everyone is completely missing the point of the CNR deal, and misapprehends its real purpose. IT IS NOT ACTUALLY INTENDED TO BE USED. The point is simply to create something like “plausible deniability,” which Shuttleworth of course can’t say openly but which I’m sure he understands.
The paradox is that by enabling a paid service, Canonical is furthering free (libre + $) software in the US- not because people are going to buy the codecs they can’t live without, but because Americans will be able to use overseas servers to get the free versions as before, and these will be indistinguishable from the “legal” Linspire versions. The existence of a legal alternative will take all the heat off Canonical by US lawyers, because they will have a solid public position, which they won’t mind to have undermined in practice.