• What is a siddur?
• What is in a siddur?
• What is the purpose of the Open Siddur Project?
• What do you mean by open? What is “free”?
• How do I start using this project?
• What is the status of the project?

Organizational Questions

• Who are you?
• How do I volunteer?
• How can I partner my project?

Technical Questions

• Why not use OCR to transcribe Hebrew?
• How can I start transcribing Hebrew text?

Copyright and Licensing Questions

• How can I share my copyrighted work?
• Can I control how others use my shared work?
• Why can’t I restrict use to non-commercial, educational, or personal use only?
• Why do you require open source licensed fonts?
• How do others impose copyright and restrict use of work that is in the Public Domain?

General Questions

A siddur is a reference book for accessing Jewish spiritual practices. Because different communities have varying customs, any given siddur represents an established liturgy, or נוּסַח nusaḥ, of the community that it was published for. There are many different סִידּוּרִים siddurim (plural for siddur) since there are so many different Jewish communities. The variation between them reflects some of the history of the communities they represent. Any one siddur is an aggregate of thousands of years of creatively inspired work by many different authors. The content of a siddur is often arranged for an individual to use alone or as part of a group, and will contain Jewish liturgy and other material suitable for participating in Jewish spiritual practices, rituals, and other circumstances.

A familiar expression of a Jewish spiritual practice is a form of intentional devotional reading, recitation, and singing. While there are pre-composed prayers in the siddur, there are also meditations, exercises, commentaries, readings from the תנ״ך TaNaKh (Hebrew Biblical Cannon), as well as instructions and guidelines for engaging in spiritual practices. The מטבע matbeia or arrangement of contents in any given Siddur might assume that text being read or listened to will help the practitioner focus their intention, access different internal relationships, and even achieve different mental states.

One-size fits all might make sense for elastic sweatpants, but hardly for expressing deep, meaningful relationships. Often, the deepest experiences are also the most fragile and difficult to access. Technologies which try to mediate these relationships, instead sadly succeed in alienating their users from their creative selves. For such an intimate relationship as that described by a spiritual practice, a mass-produced book cannot help but fail to reflect and support the practitioner’s evolving personal experience. Imagine, for a moment, a siddur where you could compare the customs and variations you’re familiar with with that of other communities, modify and adapt language and translation, incorporate personal or traditionally obscure material, and design new layouts that help you create a beautiful work reflecting your highest intentions in engaging in Jewish spiritual practices. The Open Siddur Project will help you craft such a siddur, and have it handsomely printed with an on-demand printer or custom bookbinder. Alternately, you can use the project to share material you’ve written, granting others explicit permission to adapt, modify, and incorporate it in their siddurim in accordance with standard free culture licenses. By making so much material freely accessible, we want it to be adopted by Jewish educators and spiritual leaders helping to familiarize their students in the fluency of Jewish spirituality. Perhaps you want a very traditional siddur, just like your father or mother gave you, but you want to include family customs in it, or make some minor changes to the translation, or even translate portions yourself. It would cost thousands of dollars to pay a publisher to create a custom siddur for you. By providing the ingredients, digitized and freely licensed, this project empowers you to design a siddur for yourself.

Cultures breathe creativity like we breathe oxygen. Can we envision a Jewish culture as vibrant and vital if copyright law automatically bottles up new works for the lifetime of the author plus 70 years? Free culture licenses are a means by which creators working as part of collaborative projects like Jewish spirituality, can grant their explicit permission for anyone to share, use, and modify their work so long as they provide attribution to the original author, and clearly indicate any changes to the work. The standard free culture licenses used by the Open Siddur Project are three licenses composed by the Creative Commons organization in accordance with the Wikimedia Foundation’s Definition of Free Cultural Works. We recommend the CC0 (Creative Commons Zero) license for digitizing and redistributing work from the Public Domain. We use CC BY (By Attribution) for subtly modified Public Domain works. We recommend CC BY-SA (By Attribution ShareAlike) for newly composed works and translations.

Right now, since the Open Siddur Project is still in development, you can choose and select from the material we’ve made available with our free licenses and begin making your siddur offline. We recommend you use unicode and open source licensed Hebrew fonts (e.g. Cardo or Ezra SIL), and make sure to configure your operating system with a Hebrew keyboard layout. We’ll show you how to do that. Finally, we recommend you use a free open source text layout and editing tool: the LibreOffice Writer application which is bundled in the LibreOffice suite.

Eventually and perhaps with your help, we will develop a web application that will help you to select content, edit, and maintain your changes online. In the meantime you can help us digitize content, research and scan manuscripts, provide legal support, or even help us develop the software. You can help us by volunteering for the project, sharing your own content with a standard free culture license, and helping us advocate for Judaism as a collaborative and non-proprietary communal endeavor.

This web application you mentioned, when will it be ready? I needed this last year!

So far, the Open Siddur has been developed entirely on volunteer time by a handful of contributors. The scope of our vision is large, but the time it takes to realize our vision is really only limited to the number of folks who step up and volunteer with us. In the meantime, we will be adding features as we complete them and developing partnerships with allied organizations that believe in the utility of open source development and free culture. So the short answer is that the web application we’re envisioning will be complete when we reach all of our Milestones, and that could take until 2011… or sooner based on our recent progress. You may check out our demos and keep track of our progress. Or, you can use your skills to help us make it a reality.

Organizational Questions

The Open Siddur is an open source project and anyone can join by helping to code, transcribe, translate, scan books and facsimile editions, and compose new work shared with a free culture license. The project is non-denominational and non-prescriptive. What unites us is our intention to share our work on the Siddur and in Jewish spiritual practice. We come from many different backgrounds but share a passion for making the ingredients of the Siddur freely available.

Aharon Varady founded the project in 2000 but work did not begin in earnest until the project merged with Efraim Feinstein‘s Jewish Liturgy Project in early 2009/mid-5769. Aharon and Efraim serve as co-directors with Efraim leading development of the Open Siddur web application and Aharon acting as hierophant and chief evangelist of the Open Siddur Project community and website.

Just start working on it. We need folks to transcribe, translate, scan books and facsimile editions, code, and share work they’ve already written or illustrated using free culture licenses. Communication is key in an Internet-based project like ours, so please take our survey and join our discussion list by first introducing yourself. Please don’t be shy. A table listing volunteer opportunities by skill set is here. We also accept financial donations using Razoo through our fiscal sponsor, the Center for Jewish Culture and Creativity, a registered 501(c)3 nonprofit.

The project is open source so all of the work is free for you to use for your project so long as you adhere to the licenses we are using.  In any case, please contact us so that we can help signal boost your project!

Technical Questions

Optical character recognition (OCR) works well to identify characters for English texts, and, in fact, we do use OCR on Latin-alphabet texts, such as the Singer Prayer Book and the 1917 JPS. We have not yet found any software (open or closed source) that will recognize Hebrew letters with vowels with sufficient accuracy to make the proofreading effort less work than manual transcription.

Every once in a while, we test the software that is available to us to see if it has matured enough. The open source HOCR (Hebrew OCR) project, led by Kobi Zamir, has advanced the farthest towards this objective. If you’re an open source programmer and interested in OCR then please help develop HOCR. It shows a lot of promise!

You will need to download and install Unicode fonts and a Hebrew Keyboard Layout that supports all the diacritical marks in Hebrew. We’ve prepared documentation to help you with your keyboard setup, step by step.

Copyright and Licensing Questions

Absolutely. We will share all material related to Jewish spiritual practice so long as it licensed under one of these three standard free culture licenses written by the Creative Commons:

• Creative Commons Zero (CC0): a public domain declaration
• Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY): a permissive attribution-requiring license
• Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA): a copyleft attribution-requiring license

By sharing your work with any of the above licenses you are granting explicit permission to anyone to adapt and modify your work. If you composed the work yourself we recommend sharing it with a CC BY-SA license, which mandates anyone using your work to correctly attribute its with your name as the author/artist/translators, etc, and requires any derivative work to also be licensed with that same CC BY-SA license, thus ensuring a chain of attribution to the original document and its creator.

We cannot share works that are not licensed with these licenses. Also, because of certain licensing conflicts with the language of these licenses we cannot share works that are licensed by the GNU Free Document License.

The choice to share with a free culture license should reflect your intention for others to modify and adapt your work as needed so long as they correctly attribute the work, and their changes to it. The CC BY and CC BY-SA require that derivative works state that they are modified and that there is no implication that any of the contributors endorse the modified work. (Additionally, the license preserves the chain of attribution by requiring all derivative works to be shared with that same license.) If you want to share your work but remain concerned about how your work might be modified, you may also choose to contribute the work anonymously or pseudonymously. Within the Open Siddur web application we are developing, your work will only be editable by individuals or groups you have permitted.

The public interest and the vibrancy of Jewish culture are better served by free data. “Personal use only” data serves little purpose in a database whose user base includes synagogues and educational institutions. Many of the arguments for the use of “non-commercial only” licenses are also resolved by the use of a ShareAlike copyleft license. The ShareAlike clause is an option for contributors who prefer that their contributions remain freely available. “Educational use only” licenses are purely discriminatory against non-educators, so it is inappropriate for those seeking to create works for their own or others’ Jewish spiritual practice. We strongly prefer that our users never face a legal wall in remixing any of the data they find in the Open Siddur’s public database. The Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, a free copyleft license, disallows combination of the work with works that put additional restrictions on copying and distribution. All three of these additional restrictions would result in legal incompatibility within the database.

It certainly is a beautiful font. But look carefully at the user license. The SBL Hebrew font, for example, has certain restrictions on it especially in regards to using the font in printed works. The SBL license is restricted to “non-commercial” use and requires commercial users to pay a license-fee. At this time, we know of only three Unicode Hebrew fonts suitable for presenting Jewish liturgy with nikkud and that are licensed with free and open source licenses: Cardo, Ezra SIL, and Keter YG.

One of the main objectives of our project is providing resources for folk designing and crafting siddurim for print. We must be careful to integrate technologies that are being shared with compatible free and open source licenses. Otherwise, we will be distributing work with conflicting licenses. We cannot share resources with licensing that restricts how downstream users choose to distribute their remixed work. We cannot presume that digital fonts are licensed free and open source unless explicitly indicated. Freeware, for instance, does not mean “free” as we understand it. (See above, “What’s all this about free licenses?“)

To the best of our understanding, a work that is derivative of a public domain text can be under copyright if there is some element of creative work beyond simply copying from the public domain text. Often enough, when companies or institutions attempt to restrict use of digitized Public Domain texts, they do so by claiming copyright over the layout, order, typography, or unspecified creative modifications to the original text. Creative work can include pointing (adding vowels) or creatively inserting mistakes or corrections in the text. The origin of a text may be tracable through the use of combinations of meaningless changes (choosing holam male vs holam haser in specific places, for example). These types of copyright traps allegedly exist in maps; there’s no way to show that they don’t exist in published siddurim. Unfortunately, there’s no way to tell if such creative work was done without first comparing the unknown text to a known-public domain text.

One important way the Open Siddur Project avoids this pitfall is by creating a transparent process for transcribing texts. Transcription of any text can be compared directly with the Public Domain manuscript or printed work from which the text was derived — even if that text originated from other transcription projects and is thus, also in the public domain.

The Open Siddur Project also never requires users to adhere to restrictive terms of use through End User License Agreement (EULA) click-throughs. Digitized content that may be Public Domain is sometimes restricted from redistribution by an onerous EULA. An EULA is a sort of contract between the licensee of a particular type of content (book or software) and the entity distributing it. The Open Siddur Project cannot encourage copying from corporations that use such EULAs, since we may be liable for contributory infringement (if it’s really copyrightable) or interfering with a contract (even if it isn’t).

We are being particularly careful about copyright issues for a number of reasons. Practically, if we follow our policy on copyright, the worst case is that it takes us longer to get to reach our goal in digitizing the source texts of Judaism’s spiritual works. As a very positive consequence, by transcribing and proofreading these texts we will know and correctly attribute the sources of everything shared by the project. If we ignore our theory and decide to copy anyway, we’re taking the risk that we’re wrong. We can get hit with a lawsuit that we have to defend, costing the project lots of money, whether we win or lose. Even in the best case, we probably end up losing all the work we’ve put into the project and have to start all over again.

The Open Siddur is a collaboration between individuals committed to the development of a complete framework for producing personally customized Jewish Prayer books. The framework includes a core archive of digitized siddur content accessible under permissive copyright licenses, the data encoding standards and procedures under which the content is stored, and a web application and user interface for users to generate a personally customized siddur from traditional and user-contributed sources.

History

The Open Siddur was first conceived in 2000 by Aharon Varady as an open source project archiving the sections of the Siddur, tagged according to the era of their composition and allowing user edits and user-contributions via a PERL/MySQL backend. This vision was in part inspired by Rabbi Jacob Freedman’s Polychrome Historical Haggadah (1974). Rabbi Freedman’s innovation was to clearly represent the text of the Haggadah and Siddur as aggregate texts with different authors and periods of composition. (See Freedman’s color coded legend included on a bookmark distributed with his Haggadah. In a pamphlet illustrating his vision for a Polychrome Historical Jewish Prayerbook, Rabbi Freedman wrote:

This is perhaps the first attempt to present for publication a polychrome historical prayerbook. The author herewith presents a random selection of prayers in colors merely as examples to show the various levels of historical development….The marginal symbols, also in color, indicate the period when certain prayers or phrases were first formulated and/ or introduced into the prayerbook. The references are not to be considered exhaustive.

Freedman passed away in 1986 before he could complete negotiations for the publication of his prayerbook, and tragically, his manuscript is now lost. Considering that Freedman’s use of color amounted to an early application of metadata to text, it seemed clear that a much more nuanced approach to the origin and inclusion of text in the Siddur could be supported with open source database technologies.

The Open Siddur Project remained an intriguing idea for years due to the lack of available copyright accessible digitized text of the siddur, and the lack of mature technology to automate transcription of Public Domain source material (i.e., Hebrew OCR tools that recognize nikkudot and other diacritical marks).

Meanwhile others conceived of somewhat similar projects, albeit with different scopes and target markets. Dan Sieradski developed a haggadah he called the Open Source Haggadah (2001) and proceeded to work on a web application he called the Open Source Siddur, inspired by Douglas Rushkoff’s call for an Open Source Judaism. Development of Dan’s siddur project stalled in 2006. As with Dan’s siddur, a number of other online siddurim cropped up on sites providing digitized liturgical content in a small variety of popular nusḥaot. These were provided without attribution, assuming perhaps that the restrictive terms of use were misapplied by their publishers to works originating from the Public Domain. (The Open Siddur Project explicitly defines free according to the Wikimedia Foundation’s Definition of Free Cultural Works. For this reason we use standard free culture licenses from the Creative Commons to indicate how works in our database may be redistributed. We will never restrict material with an end-user license agreement (EULA).)

During this time, a graduate student at Harvard, Efraim Feinstein, was looking for an active Free and Open Source (FOSS) project for developing a siddur. A self-taught hacker, Feinstein found that the other existing projects were either technologically inadequate to the task, or insufficiently supportive of free culture values. While Varady’s “Open Siddur Project” proposed a similar idea, a six year old web page without a code base made him think that the author had gone on to other things and that the project was forgotten. Finding no active and worthwhile project to partner with, Efraim began on his own, calling it the Jewish Liturgy Project (JLP) because “all the obvious names were taken”.

Feinstein coded on and off, going through different versions of standard and non-standard methods of XML encoding, and finally settling on an encoding schema defined by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). Efraim began transcribing a haggadah over a period of two months, from January to March 2008. Not wanting to announce the project until he had produced something minimal to release, the project was not made public until the first code was committed to Google Code on December 10, 2008.

Later that month, on December 31, 2008, a young self-taught Brooklyn hacker named Azriel Fasten contacted both Feinstein and Varady, asking the latter about reviving the Open Siddur. Varady and Feinstein were soon introduced and agreed on a common vision for the project. Feinstein, who fully embraces the culture of free and open source software development, welcomed Varady’s willingness to contribute, and was happy to connect his project to that of the Open Siddur name. Varady was overjoyed that a passionate developer community was coalescing around this newly shared vision and was eager to help Feinstein lay the foundations for a robust server process, XML encoded digital text archive, and web application.

Current Status

As of 2010, development of the Open Siddur focuses primarily on building core processes, standards, and text resources. For more detail, please check out our list of Milestones. Discussion of the Open Siddur continues on our discussion list and project development continues on the code base hosted at Google code. Transcription of texts and project documentation is available at our documentation wiki.

Our community is open, so please count yourself as invited. We welcome your contribution. If you’re a coder, please introduce yourself and your capabilities on our discussion list.

Media inquiries can be directed to Aharon Varady, [ aharon ⒜ opensiddur (°) org ].

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