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I know that my next statement won't make me many friends here but I don't think that Debian has anything to gain at all from this proposition and that Mark is basically looking for some free labor for Ubuntu to make sure that their LTS releases will do what they're supposed to do.

For starters, Debian is much bigger in scope than Ubuntu: Debian supports many architectures as equally as it is possible given the technical restraints and boundaries; Ubuntu cares mostly about x86 with PowerPC as an afterthought. I can't possibly see how Debian can sync its release cycle with Ubuntu's.

Debian developers maintain pretty much all the 20000+ packages in their repositories whereas only packages in Universe are supported by Canonical/the Ubuntu community. People installing software from multiverse are on their own.

Speaking of Universe, it is mostly a snapshot of a *really* small subset of the packages available on Sid taken every six months where Canonical developers will mostly provide some polish with little or no contribution to their upstream providers. Of course, it is easy to commit to have 2000 software packages working every six months when the upstream has to care about 20000 packages for many architectures and will be lagging far behind to get their release up to the snuff.

Debian developers are mostly volunteers that work on their free time so I can't see how they can coordinate themselves to work for free and target the needs of a competitor that will most likely give little back (Let's face it: Mark committing to provide developers is self-serving. Mark himself said that he is not willing to align their release cycle with Debian's and also part with the developers. It either one or the other...).

Please don't get me wrong, I don't like Ubuntu but I don't necessarily hate it and even recommend people to use it when it is clearly the better choice. I hate the fact that KDE is always measured by what Canonical does with Kubuntu, though: Kubuntu is disgraceful and KDE is often blamed for the things wrong with it. I rarely agree with sbergman27 when it comes to DE choices but I think that he nailed it on a previous post: Canonical should either improve the effort put into it or just stop pretending that KDE is supported at all and drop it altogether. But having said that, I am honestly struggling to understand what Debian stand to gain from such a deal.

The reason that the Ubuntu community is up in arms over this issue is that Ubuntu stands to gain the most from this. Otherwise they could care less about what Debian is doing. I have yet to see the outcry because CentOS packages are outdated...

Debian's policy of "release when it is ready" is one of the reasons that makes its users love it and that I use it on my servers and my desktop. People that want the latest and greatest can - and should - use testing (which despite the name is as stable or more stable than most distros), backports or even Sid with apt-pinning.

The Debian developers are rightfully entitled to evaluate if their project stands to gain anything from this deal or not.