It has been my privilege in my career to work with some truly talented people, and my misfortunute to work with some whose talents were only in bullshit. I am thinking now of the smartest, by a considerable margin, guy I know, a former cow-orker and a cryptographer. He is the nicest, humblest guy you could hope to meet, he always had time to deal with my stupid questions (I was the only non-PhD in that team). And this is a general pattern: truly smart guys are beyond ego, they exist on another plane. They have time for mortals because they effortlessly see the big picture.

Now let me be brutally honest about Torvalds: Tanenbaum was correct. He is not a great coder or a great thinker, Linux as he wrote it was indeed as Tanenbaum said, a giant step backwards. Torvalds just happened to be at the right place at the right time to be at the nucleus of a nascent social movement (what we now call Open Source). What has he done lately - Transmeta? And he is well aware of this himself I suspect: the abrasive personality is his insecurity showing.