Rails has always been fully open source. If you didn't understand something you simply looked at the Rails source code. At the time it came out most people were using .NET or Java which were largely closed source and PHP which was open source, but there were no real frameworks at that time. CodeIgniter and Cake came out in the couple of years following and were both immature in comparison.
> If you didn't understand something you simply looked at the Rails source code.
Okay, but what if instead a library was designed to be more reasonable and intuitive, such that you didn't need to dig through its source to understand what you needed? This is the problem with "magic".
> most people were using .NET or Java which were largely closed source and PHP
These are programming languages. Rails is a web framework.
