[durin42]

Let's say they use instant messenger services, so they have Pidgin installed. I'm pretty sure there have been critical bugfixes in Pidgin, and the old Hardy version of Pidgin was so flaky for me 2 years ago (back before my workplace had moved to Lucid) that I installed my own from source.

Ubuntu's answer to that? Well, those aren't security fixes, so you can upgrade to $LATEST_RELEASE if you want the non-critical fixes. Ubuntu is trying to force a 2+ year bugfix cycle on software maintainers, and that's just not realistic for many small teams (both proprietary and open source).

This is a particular example, but I can think of other cases where this might be a problem. OpenOffice updates after a new MS Office release come to mind offhand.