Interview with Martin Taylor - MS's chief Linux Strategist

http://www.computerworld.com/softwar...,95988,00.html

So you think, in the long term, Novell is your greatest Linux competitor? No question, because they have the best point-to-point stack from the kernel through to the application layer and things that go on top of it. Now the challenge will be [that] they're going to need to do stuff to differentiate themselves from Red Hat, which then means that they need to find ways to basically almost have a customized distribution. And you can end up with Linux not being Linux, but Red Hat Linux being different than Novell SUSE Linux, Debian Linux and Mandrake, or whatever the case is. We're already beginning to see some of that with how they're taking snapshots of the kernel, where the kernel is and putting it into their distributions.