see Jack Wallen's article on the announcement here.
Some excerpts from the article:
What was that announcement? Developers from multiple Linux distributions (and companies) are collaborating on the "snap" universal Linux package format. This universal package would enable a single binary package to work perfectly (and securely) on any Linux desktop, server, cloud, or device. In fact, this community of developers (from Arch, Gentoo, Debian, Fedora, and Ubuntu), have come together to create Snapcraft.io. This website provides a publication mechanism for any software in any Linux environment.
Updates are also improved with snaps. Snap package updates will be automatically delivered. Should the update fail, it is cancelled. Should the update be buggy, it can be easily rolled back to a previous state. All of this combined will drastically improve the flow of features, fixes, and the feedback cycle for commercial and open source applications.
The only caveat to this is that Canonical sent out the alert to Red Hat but has yet to hear back from them. This could mean commercial snaps are limited to SUSE.