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. 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