Do you seriously not see the difference between Lennart saying something like "if you don't like it, you're wrong and should use another distro" [that doesn't use Systemd] and Linus saying things like "you should have been retroactively aborted" and "you're so stupid I can't believe you didn't die as a child'?
Or the difference between him telling someone not to use his software and people setting up crowd funding to hire a hitman?
But I was paraphrasing Poettering's responses to perfectly valid criticism. He did basically say "fuck off", just sugar coated it, which doesn't make it any better. It's just really incongruous to hear someone who is so polarizing (on purpose!) claim that other people should not be so polarizing. And funny how he never seemed to notice these assholes until his friend, Kay Sievers, got called out on LKML for refusing to fix a bug he introduced. It fits though; Poettering is so short sighted that he can't even see the value in portability, nor does he think anything besides desktop Linux matters (when Linux runs, oh, everywhere).
Are you aware that Poettering's PulseAudio project runs on Windows? Are you aware that the only Linux init system that ever ran on a non-Linux kernel (sysvinit) did so only because the FreeBSD and Hurd kernels implemented the Linux-specific /proc filesystem?
Or the difference between him telling someone not to use his software and people setting up crowd funding to hire a hitman?