Many people in the open-source community are known for their hostility towards people whom they don’t like. I voiced some criticism of the “usability” of the Perl Online World for Newcomers, and there are similar sentiments about problems in treating people in the “HOWTO Encourage Women in Linux” document. I’ve also witnessed how one very important open-source project, which I was involved in, stagnated, because its developers were incredibly rude on their on-line forums and scared away most potential contributors.
Such hostility may be detrimental to a project’s success or the success of the open-source community in general.