Open Source Judaism
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.
Sharing Torah in Rabbinic Judaism
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. Open-source Judaism concerns itself with whether works of Jewish culture are shared in accord with Jewish teachings concerning proper stewardship of the Commons and civic responsibilities of property ownership.The rhetorical virtue of parrhesia appears in Midrashic literature as a condition for the transmission of Torah. Connoting open and public communication, parrhesia appears in combination with the term, , translated coram publica, in the public eye, i.e. open to the public As a mode of communication it is repeatedly described in terms analogous to a Commons. Parrhesia is closely associated with an ownerless wilderness of primary mytho-geographic import, the Midbar Sinai in which the Torah was initially received. The dissemination of Torah thus depends on its teachers cultivating a nature which is as open, ownerless, and sharing as that wilderness. Here is the text from the Mekhilta where the term dimus parrhesia appears.
Moreover, the place in which the story of the Torah's revelation occurred becomes analogous to the personal virtue that a student and teacher of Torah must cultivate in oneself. In the midrashic work, Bamidbar Rabbah, an exegesis based on the phonetic similarities between the name Sinai, and the word she'eino meaning "that is not," is offered:
The question of whether ḥidushei torah, Jewish liturgy, and derivative and related work are in some sense proprietary is subordinate to the importance given to preserving the lineage of a teaching. According to a mishnaic teaching of Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi, the 48th attribute of an excellent student is their capability in citing a teaching in the name of the one they learned it from.
The question of whether new works of Torah learning are given the status of property is a question born of the commodification of printed works, competition, and prestige in modernity. In their academic article "Is Copyright Property? – The Debate in Jewish Law," Neil Netanel and David Nimmer explain that,
According to rabbinic Jewish teaching, the primary sin committed by the people of Sodom was their insistence on the absolute primacy of property, declaring that "what is mine is mine and what is yours is yours."
What is akin to copyright in Jewish law in part derives from exclusive printing privileges that rabbinic authorities have issued since the invention of the printing press and date back to 1518. 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. According to the minority position of Rabbi Joseph Saul Nathanson, a copyright is itself a property right arising out of the right of ownership. However, according to the majority position of Rabbi Yitzhak Schmelkes, "the author’s exclusive right to publish a manuscript and sell a first edition flows not from a proprietary copyright in the text, but only from the Jewish law of unfair competition or from the author’s right to condition access and use of the physical chattel, the manuscript, in which the author holds a property right." Ultimately, determination on the legal treatment of works of Jewish liturgy and ḥidushei torah depend upon a basic facet of rabbinic Jewish law: dinah malkhuta dina—the law of the land is the Law. Under United States copyright law, for instance, all newly created "creative" works are considered as intellectual property and afforded proprietary property rights that restrict adaptation and redistribution of the works by others without explicit permission granted by the copyright owner.
To establish a community based instead on ḥesed, the custom has long been for individuals to share or provide others with personal possessions as needed. The institution of the G'MaḤ provided a practical example for the sharing of books, tools, and services. The ideal of contributing to or forming one's own G'MaḤ was popularized by Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan, who addressed many halakhic questions about the practice and lauded the spiritual benefits of lending property in chapter 22 of his work, Ahavat Ḥesed : " 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." Rashi explains ḥesed here to mean the lending of money, chattel, livestock—all being included in the mitzvah."
Free-Libre and Open-source Software
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. "Free software" is software shared under a free license, where the definition of "free" is maintained by .Much of the development of free and open-source software was developed by Israeli computer scientists and programmers for the display, analysis, and manipulation of Hebrew text. This development has been celebrated by Hamakor a secular organization founded in 2003 to promote free and open-source software in Israel.
Calendar Calculus
The earliest example of free software written for Jews may be the calendar code in GNU Emacs developed by Nachum Dershowitz and Edward Reingold in 1988, which included a Jewish calendar. This calendar code was further adapted by Danny Sadinoff in 1992 as . Such software provided a proof-of-concept for the utility of Open Source for innovating interesting and useful software for the Jewish and Hebrew speaking community. In 2005, the LGPL licensed was begun by Eliyahu Hershfeld to maintain open-source software and code libraries for calculating zmanim, specific times of the day with applications in Jewish law.Morphological Analysis
In 2000, Israeli linguists Nadav Har'El and Dan Kenigsberg began development of an open-source Hebrew morphological analyzer and spell-checking program, Hspell. In 2004, Kobi Zamir created a GUI for Hspell. Currently the Hspell morphological analyzer is accessible at meaning.wiki. The Culmus Project developed , a semi-automatic diacritics tool based on Wiktionary for use with Open Office and LibreOffice.Digital Typography
In September 2002, Maxim Iorsh publicly released v.0.6 of Culmus, a package of Unicode Hebrew digital fonts licensed under the GPL, free software license. These and other fonts shared with SIL-OFL and GPL+FE licenses, provided the basic means for displaying Hebrew text on and offline in documents shared with Open Content licenses and in software shared with non-conflicting open-source licenses.Canonical Jewish and liturgical texts depend upon diacritics for vocalization of Hebrew. 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. By 2008, several open-source licensed fonts supporting Hebrew diacritics were available including Ezra, Cardo, and Keter YG. The Open Siddur Project maintains a comprehensive archive of Unicode Hebrew fonts organized by license, typographer, style, and diacritical support.
Complex Text Layout
Throughout the 2000s, the display and rendering of Hebrew with diacritics improved with support of complex text layouts, bidirectional text, and right-to-left positioned text in most popular open-source web browsers, text editors, and graphic editors. Improved support is still needed, especially in open-source text layout/design applications utilizing text.Hebrew Script OCR
In 2005, Kobi Zamir, began development of the first Hebrew OCR to recognize Hebrew diacritics, , released open-source under the GPL. A GUI, soon followed. By 2010, development on hOCR had stalled; legacy code is available on . In 2012, researchers at Ben-Gurion University began training the open-source Tesseract-OCR to read Hebrew with niqud. Meanwhile, open-source OCR software supporting other Jewish languages written in Hebrew script is in development, namely, for Yiddish, being developed by Assaf Urieli. Urieli explains the difficulty of supporting Hebrew with diacritics in OCR software:Open Content Projects
Although a work of radical 1960s Jewish counterculture rather than an explicitly religious work, the satirical songbook Listen to the mocking bird 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 lacked open access policies. In 1999, the Hebrew equivalent of Project Gutenberg, , was established in Israel as a digital repository of Hebrew literature in the Public Domain. 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 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.
Torah Databases and the Digital Humanities
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. The Westminster Leningrad Codex, a digital transcription of the Leningrad Codex maintained by the J. Alan Groves Center for Advanced Biblical Research at the Westminster Theological Seminary was based on the Michigan-Claremont-Westminster Electronic Text of Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia and shared with a Public Domain dedication.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. The digital library at Hebrew Wikisource consists not just of texts that have been typed and proofread, but also hundreds of texts that have been punctuated and formatted, texts are linked in tens of thousands of places to sources and parallel literature, texts that have collaboratively produced commentaries, and texts that have been corrected in new editions based on manuscripts and early versions. While Hebrew Wikisource is open to all texts in Hebrew, and not just to Judaica, it has primarily focused on the latter because the vast majority of public domain Hebrew texts are rabbinic ones. Hebrew Wikisource was the first independent language-domain of Wikisource. In 2009, was created.
In 2013, Dr. Seth Kadish and a small team completed a carefully corrected draft of a new digital experimental edition of the Tanakh at Hebrew Wikisource, , based on the Aleppo Codex and related manuscripts, and consulting the full range of masoretic scholarship.
In 2010, Moshe Wagner began work on a cross-platform Torah database called Orayta. Source code is licensed GPL and copyrighted content is licensed CC-BY.
In 2012, Joshua Foer and Brett Lockspeiser began work on developing a free-culture licensed digital library of canonical Jewish sources and a web application for generating "sourcesheets" from this repository. The Sefaria Project organizes the translation of essential works of rabbinic Judaism, such as the Mishnah, and seeks English translations of many other seminal texts. The project mostly uses a combination of CC-BY and CC0 licenses to share its digital library and foster collaboration of its paid and volunteer contributors. 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.