page_title: Open Source Judaism
section_title: Open Content Projects
hierarchical_section_title: Open Source Judaism / Open Content Projects
context_page_description: Open-source Judaism is a name given to initiatives within the Jewish community employing Open Content and open-source licensing strategies for collaboratively creating and sharing works about or inspired by 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.
context_section_description: Although a work of radical 1960s Jewish counterculture rather than an explicitly religious work, the satirical songbook Listen to the mocking bird (Times Change Press, 1971) by the Fugs' Naphtali "Tuli" Kupferberg contains the earliest explicit mention of "copyleft" in a copyright disclaimer.
  While digital editions of biblical and rabbinic Jewish sourcetexts proliferated on the World Wide Web by the mid-2000s, many of these lacked information as to the provenance of their digital texts. Common Torah database applications such as the Bar-Ilan Responsa Project and Hebrew text editing software such as Davka Corps. DavkaWriter, relied upon end-user license agreements explicitly forbidding the copy of included texts despite these texts residing in the Public Domain. Other websites, such as Mechon Mamre, presented public domain texts but indicated that the digital editions they presented were Copyrighted works, "All Rights Reserved." Many scholarly databases containing transcriptions of manuscripts and digital image collections of scanned manuscripts (e.g. hebrewbooks.org) lacked open access policies. In 1999, the Hebrew equivalent of Project Gutenberg, Project Ben Yehudah, was established in Israel as a digital repository of Hebrew literature in the Public Domain (excepting religious texts). 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.
  Open Content licensing and Public Domain dedications provide the basis for open collaboration and content sharing across open-source projects of particular interest to Hebrew readers and students of Judaism. The importance of compatible licensing cannot be understated. In the summer of 2009, content across the Wikimedia Foundation adopted new Open Content licensing in response to incompatibilities between the GNU Free Document license and the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) copyleft license. After this, other non-Wikimedia Foundation projects using Open Content licensing were finally able to exchange content with Wikipedia and Wikisource under a common standard copyleft. This license transition was also significant because Wikisource provided a transcription environment available for multi-user collaboration. With the switch to an Open Content copyleft license, users could collaborate on transcriptions at Wikisource without concern for license incompatibility of the resulting digital editions.
caption: Hebrew Wikisource, a database of largely rabbinic Jewish texts in Hebrew