I agree with Mark Constable's comment above.

In sparr's view of the world, all software is actively maintained
by individuals who are deeply committed to free software
(and especialy the Ubuntu distribution), 
and to pedantic adherence to standards.

In the real world.... let's look at my own software, Sun Java.
Every Makefile command is implicitly an invocation of /bin/sh.
There are on the order of 1000 "shell scripts" in Sun Java
Makefiles that invoke "echo -e" through use of a Makefile macro.
Some engineer would have to audit all of those uses to make
sure that those uses are safe with plain "echo" or convert them
to use printf(1).  Since the Makefiles belong to different 
components, many separate component owners need to 
review and approve such a change.   This is the kind of
change that engineers have a really hard time getting excited
about.  I might be masochistic enough to take this on, but in
most corporate organizations such an unpalatable task will
simply be left undone, unless Ubuntu compatibility suddenly
becomes a high-visibility management issue.

On the other extreme, many projects are left in a dormant state
for many years.  I remember gzip going without any releases
for a decade.  Even an organization like the FSF is not going
to make all their software "Ubuntu-compatible" any time soon.

Ubuntu's change to dash sends the message
"We don't care about serious users."
Corporations are likely to respond in kind:
"We don't support hobbyist OSes with a history
of making recklessly incompatible changes every release."
which will make Ubuntu less useful for everyone.

As others have pointed out, you can speed up bootup by
making /bin/dash a required component and using /bin/dash
explicitly in the startup scripts.

-- 
Script that are using bash could be broken with the new symlink
https://launchpad.net/bugs/61463

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