Define brilliant. One changed the computing landscape by starting (and running for decades) the biggest opensource copyleft project in the history of mankind; the other is a bog-standard corporate engineer who simply leverages his parent company status to piss off most people and get away with it. Placing them on the same level is an insult to Linus, who might occasionally be an asshole but is still the most effective leader the opensource community has ever seen.
The funny thing is that Torvalds is not much of an asshole unless you violate the trust he have placed in you.
He will gladly chastise himself for errors etc, and is quite humble in public.
Poettering on the other hand have a history of hubris and assholeness.
Consider for example that he not only heckled a presenter at a conference. But when the presenter bowed out early he climbed the stage, beer bottle in hand, to grab the microphone.
It would not surprise me of Poettering have never met hardship during his school years (apparently the signing scheme used in journald was based on his brother's doctoral thesis no less) until he hit the net with his projects, and simply do not know how the handle negative feedback.
Define brilliant. One changed the computing landscape by starting (and running for decades) the biggest opensource copyleft project in the history of mankind; the other is a bog-standard corporate engineer who simply leverages his parent company status to piss off most people and get away with it. Placing them on the same level is an insult to Linus, who might occasionally be an asshole but is still the most effective leader the opensource community has ever seen.