[twobyfour]

Absolutely. The dominant tone varies from community to commuity. The end result is that some communities are more helpful to new members than others; some are more collaborative and into sharing or open source than others. You'll find more showboating and chest-beating in some communities than others. Some simply have higher levels of participation and interaction in IRC and mailing lists than others.

Obviously, if a technology isn't a good fit for your project, you shouldn't use it anyway just because of its community. But if you're choosing between technologies that are both appropriate for a given project (say, Rails vs. Django for a CRUD web app), community can and should be a major factor - especially if you're new to the technology.