Off-site Tools & Resources

The Open Siddur is only one example of a host of projects working to transcend the impositions of copyright laws while sharing, remixing, and redistributing the products of our intellectual Commons. There are a number of related projects in Open Source Judaism today whose use of free-culture compatible open content and open source licensing is profoundly affecting Jewish education and cultural vitality. If you have a link to add to this list, please contact us. (For our legacy, “environmental scan” of comparative, complementary, competing, and collaborative projects, circa 2009, see here.)

Open-source Licensed Jewish Content

Rabbinic and other Jewish Literature

Hebrew Wikisource: a Wiki for Hebrew Texts. Includes transcriptions of Biblical and Rabbinic source texts.
Orayta: a Torah database of rabbinic Jewish texts
Sefaria: an advanced interface for accessing Biblical and Rabbinic source-text, and preparing custom source-sheets.
The Ben-Yehudah Project: Modern Hebrew literature and poetry in the Public Domain, digitized.

Liturgists and Scholars

Mechon Hadar: the umbrella institution of Yeshivat Hadar
Davar Akher the blog of Judaics scholar, Simon Halloway.
Neohasid.org, Rabbi David Seidenberg and friend’s liturgy, songs, and divrei tefillah
Triganza, Trisha Arlin’s liturgy, poetry, and prose.

Open-source Software

Hebrew Calendar: the venerable, open-source and free-culture licensed Hebrew calendar. (Plugin for Mozilla Firefox, too!)
PocketTorah: Open Source Software for learning kriyat hatorah.
Culmus Project: Hebrew fonts
Hspell: creating an open-source Hebrew spell-checker and Hebrew morphological analyzer
Lenaked: auto-nikkud software
Nakdan: semi-automatic diacritics tool based on Wiktionary (by Culmus Project!)
Hebrew Nikud Toolbar extension for OpenOffice and LibreOffice, based on word lists from Hspell
qhOCR: a Qt interface for Kobi Zamir’s hOCR (Hebrew OCR) project for the OCR of Hebrew with niqqud. (Kobi Zamir also wrote a GUI for Hspell!)
ScanTailor: a tool for digital archivists creating page images (scans) from books or other printed works

Image and Audio Archives

All content shared in these archives is free to adapt, remix, and redistribute per the terms of Creative Commons free-culture licenses or Public Domain dedications.

The Internet Archive
Wikisource
Wikimedia Commons
LibriVox: archive of Public Domain Audiobook recordings. (Includes recordings of work shared by the Open Siddur Project!)

Searching for Open Content

Flickr
Youtube
Soundcloud
Google Images: click on “search tools” and “labeled for reuse with modifications”

Public Domain (except for translations)

Digital Humanities Projects

Friedberg Jewish Manuscript Archive: for the Friedberg Genizah Project
Dead Sea Scrolls Project
Online Critical Pseudepigrapha
The Internet Sacred Text Archive: Sacred texts from across the world transcribed and proofread by John B. Hare.
The World English Bible translation project
The Westminster Leningrad Codex: digital edition of the Leningrad Codex, graciously shared in the Public Domain
Open Scriptures: platform for the development of open scriptural linked data and its applications
Rabbinic Traditions (English translations of Talmudic sources available nowhere else)
JTS Manuscript Collection

Piyyutim and Zemirot

Iyunei Tefila (Hebrew)
Zemirot Database
The Sephardic Pizmonim Project: An important project to digitize the tradition of Pizmonim among Sepharadi Jewry.
Zemereshet: Database of Hebrew Lyrics
The Piyyut Project (now at the NLI. Old site is archived here.)

Invaluable Tools (not explicitly open-source)

Jewish Calendar Year Conversion Tool (JewishGen)
Hebrew Braile Conversion Tool (JBI International)
Naqdan (for adding niqqud to unpointed (unvoweled/vocalized) Hebrew text)
DeepL Machine Translation
charaktêres (for investigating magical scripts)

The Public Domain & Copyright: Terminology, Tools, and Articles

Creative Work as Property

- - “Public Domain“
  - “Copyright“
  - “Copyfraud“
  - “End-User License Agreements“

The “Free-Culture Movement“

- - “Open-source Religion“
  - “Open-source History “
  - “Gratis” versus “Libre” (free without payment versus free as in freedom for reuse)
    - “Open Access” in the publication of peer-reviewed research (important application of Gratis vs. Libre)

The Standard Definitions of Free and Open

- - The Definition of “Free Cultural Works” (as maintained by the Free Culture Foundation)
  - The Definition of “Open” and “Open Service” (as maintained by the Open Knowledge Foundation)
  - The Definition of “Open Source” (as maintained by the Open Source Initiative)

“Open-source Licensing“

- - “Copyleft” licenses
  - “Free content” and “Open content“
  - “License Compatibility“

“Open-source Judaism“

- - “GeMaḤ” (Gemilut Ḥasadim)
  - “Dimus Parrhesia“
  - “Open Siddur Project“