Open Source Judaism

Open-source efforts in Judaism utilize licensing strategies by which contemporary products of Jewish culture under copyright may be adopted, adapted, and redistributed with credit and attribution accorded to the creators of these works.

Often collaborative, these efforts are comparable to those of other open-source religious initiatives inspired by the free culture movement to openly share and broadly disseminate seminal texts and techniques under the aegis of copyright law.

Combined, these initiatives describe an open-source movement in Judaism that values correct attribution of sources, creative sharing in an intellectual commons, adaptable future-proof technologies, open technological standards, open access to primary and secondary sources and their translations, and personal autonomy in the study and craft of works of Torah.

Unencumbered access to educational resources, the importance of attribution, and limiting proprietary claims on intellectual property, are all matters common to open-source, the free culture movement, and rabbinic Judaism.

These privileges typically give the publisher the exclusive right to print the book for a period of ten to twenty years or until the first edition has been sold (i.e., after the author or heirs have recovered their investment).

The ideal of contributing to or forming one's own G'MaḤ was popularized by Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan (1838-1933), who addressed many halakhic questions about the practice and lauded the spiritual benefits of lending property in chapter 22 of his work, Ahavat Ḥesed (Loving Loving-kindness, 1888): "[Lending property] stems from compassion and constitutes a mitzvah, as ḤaZa"L have pointed out: "tzedaka is performed with one's money; ḥesed with one's money and one's self.

"[15] Prior to the coinage and adoption of the term "Open Source" in 1998, several Jewish computer scientists, typographers, and linguists developed free software of interest to Jews, students of Judaism, and readers of Hebrew.

In 2000, Israeli linguists Nadav Har'El and Dan Kenigsberg began development of an open-source Hebrew morphological analyzer and spell-checking program, Hspell (official website).

Upon the introduction of the Unicode 4.0 standard in 2003, the Culmus Project, SIL, and other open-source typographers were able to begin producing digital fonts supporting the full range of Hebrew diacritics.

The Open Siddur Project maintains a comprehensive archive of Unicode Hebrew fonts organized by license, typographer, style, and diacritical support.

"[28] Rushkoff's vision of an Open Source Judaism was comparable to some other expressions of open-source religion explicitly advocating for doctrinal reform or change in practice.

[30]) Early confusion over the means by which "open-source" projects collaborate, led some Jewish social entrepreneurs inspired by Rushkoff's idea to develop their work without indicating a license, publicly sharing code, or attributing content.

[34] Instead of rallying around Open Source as a means towards religious reform as Rushkoff suggested, other open-source Jewish projects strive to present their work as non-denominational and non-prescriptive.

They see free-culture and open-source licensing as a practical means towards preserving culture, improving participation, and supporting educational objectives in an era of shifting media formats and copyright restrictions.

In an interview with the Atlantic Magazine, the founder of the open-source Open Siddur Project, Aharon Varady, explained, Open source offered a licensing strategy that could be employed for helping a community of users remix user-generated content such as translations of liturgy in the preparation of new prayerbooks, or for anyone to simply access Jewish content that could be redistributed with attribution and without fear of copyright infringement.

The limited scope of Project Ben Yehuda presented a need for another platform to be used for editing, proofreading and formatting religious Jewish texts in Hebrew under a free license in a collaborative environment.

Inside and outside the Jewish community, digital humanities projects often developed by scholars in academic institutions and theological seminaries, provided the basis for later open-source initiatives.

[39] Hebrew Wikisource was created in 2004 to provide a free and openly licensed home for what is known in Israel as the "Traditional Jewish Bookshelf," thus filling the need left by Project Ben Yehudah.

In 2013, Dr. Seth (Avi) Kadish and a small team completed a carefully corrected draft of a new digital experimental edition of the Tanakh at Hebrew Wikisource, Miqra `al pi ha-Mesorah, based on the Aleppo Codex and related manuscripts, and consulting the full range of masoretic scholarship.

Certain seminal works, notably the JPS 1985 and the Steinsaltz translation of the Talmud, are shared under restrictive Creative Commons licenses that do not conform to open-source principles.

The project helped incorporate numerous articles from the Jewish Encyclopedia (1906), a reference work in the Public Domain, so that it would be shared and expanded upon under the terms adopted by the Wikimedia Foundation.

In 2011, Russel Neiss and Rabbi Charlie Schwartz were supported by the Jewish New Media Fund in building PocketTorah, a portable app for studying the chanting of the weekly Torah reading.

In 2009, the PresenTense Institute in Jerusalem served as the meeting place for Aharon Varady (Open Siddur), Russel Neiss, and Rabbi Charlie Schwartz (PocketTorah).

The umbrella institution of the Halakhic Egalitarian yeshiva, Yeshivat Hadar, revised its copyright policy in November 2014 and began sharing its searchable database of sourcesheets, lectures, and audio recordings of Jewish melodies with a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license.