In addition to ease of use, broad adoption of these frameworks has brought along with it an open source culture, characterized by an emphasis on community, de jure licensing, and more sophisticated planning and architecture for the presentation-tier of Web applications. (While the definition of open source typically focuses specifically on what licenses qualify, these licenses carry with them a set of cultural impacts, just as the View Source command brought with it a set of cultural impacts.)

First, and most obviously, an open source culture is characterized by explicit license rather than borderline theft or gift of use. While the View Source culture sometimes included explicit permission ("Can I copy what you've done here?"), it more often relied on a kind of borrowing that ranged from imitation to outright copyright infringement or theft. An open source culture relies not only on a kind of de facto or assumption-based sharing of information, but a formally stated, de jure grant of specific rights to all users. This explicit license also facilitates innovation, as improvements made by users of the code can be contributed back into the community and the benefits of those innovations shared with other users directly.

Additionally, an open source culture is characterized by communities that develop around the frameworks. These communities have differing levels of formality, professionalism, and "helpfulness," but all represent a great leap forward compared to the random deciphering of other people's code, which characterized the View Source culture. To revisit Tim O'Reilly's metaphor about "View Source," in an open source culture, a would-be developer cannot only look over the shoulder of other developers, but he or she can join them in a conference room and discuss the code directly. Open source culture also helps to ensure repeatability and maintenance of the leveraged code base because when newer versions or patches are released, there is a well-organized mechanism for announcing and providing access to the code, something that the View Source culture generally lacked.

Finally, an open source culture is characterized by a greater degree of attention to standards and interoperability. Because open source projects gain their strength from the breadth of their use and the size of their community, they tend to focus much more clearly on methods of sharing. Even in cases where an individual's needs are contrary to the direction of the overall project, open source licensing allows for and encourages the development of extensions and alternate versions to meet specific problem sets.

Community and Professionalism
In some ways, one could point out the essential difference between the Web development culture, which relies heavily on open source frameworks and libraries, and the first generation of Web development, which relied on View Source and imitation, in the same way that free / open source software advocates have long distinguished between them: by drawing the "free as in beer" versus "free as in speech" (or "free as in freedom") comparison.

Viewing the source of a Web page developed by someone else, including digging into the CSS and JavaScript that accompanies the HTML, has always been free, as in beer. If you have access to a Web browser and can display the page, you can get to the source. Open source frameworks like Prototype.js, Dojo, DWR, the YUI library, and the Zimbra toolkit, however, are free as in speech. Not only can you access the source code without cost, you are encouraged and explicitly granted the right to use, modify, and redistribute your modifications to others.

The early days of the World Wide Web were characterized by open experimentation and the de facto sharing of source, whereas the trend today is toward maturity, professionalism, and the de jure sharing of open source frameworks. This evolution is a sign of the growing professionalism of the Web development community.

While the current AJAX-style development community faces many ongoing challenges - working out JavaScript namespace issues, encouraging better adherence to security best practices, and dealing with accessibility issues are at the top of a substantial list - the broad, active, and transparent communities behind open source AJAX frameworks bode well for the possibilities of solving such challenges and continuing the evolution of Web development.

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