The reputation that open source communities have for hostility is justified. Open source communities, particularly those surrounding older projects or those whose members are mostly part of the old guard, tend to be elitist (in the sense that they expect a high level of competence from even new contributors and react with hostility to contributions that don’t meet their standards). Whether or not this is a bad thing depends on which of several groups you belong to within the open source sphere.
There are a couple different ways to look at the purpose of an open source community. One is the FSF attitude: that licensing is a social and moral concern, and so opening up software is valuable in of itself. The second is the Cathedral & Bazaar attitude: development methods associated with open source communities are more efficient at creating reliable software than those associated with traditional proprietary shops. The third I will call the BSD attitude (not because I think BSD maintainers necessarily subscribe to it, but because people who take this attitude often use permissive licenses like the BSDL): open source development methods are sensible because, in the absence of a profit motive, there’s no point in making any particular effort to lock down the source code for your personal projects.
If you hang out with contributors or maintainers of open source projects, you will meet all three types of people. The thing is, these goals have very different…