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.