"Is open source religion (OSR) necessary?" Personally, I agree that it is, nowadays, in order to be meaningful.

"Is OSR sufficient?" I feel not. I feel that another prerequisite is that the religion and its works should also be in the public domain.

"But that's the same thing, right?" No. There are "open source licences" instead, all of which rely on copyright.

"What are the repercussions of copyright?" By default, and I've searched the site and not found any note to the contrary, copyright is granted whenever you create a work, and means that the distilled wisdom amassed in the pages *cannot be reproduced* without permission of all the individual authors of the articles. Nobody can print a book from it, nobody can reproduce more than a couple of paragraphs from any article, without getting the permission of its original author. Each article is a separate work and *belongs to a single person*. All that can be done with them is display them in the forum to which they were posted.

"But the project belongs to us all. We are One." Not in the eyes of the law, no.

"GNU license it then!" I beg you, avoid that path of evil. Traditional monolithic religions have contained evil "viral" clauses: parents must bring up children in the religion (Various Christianity); women of the religion may not marry men of another as they'd have no say on the children's religion (Islam)... etc. GPL is similar: you may not use text from a document in another document, without the whole document becoming licensed under the GPL.

That's viral licensing, is evil, and has no place in a good religion.

Public Domain is the path of nonevil. The Bible, the Koran, All US Government documents, etc are public domain, and can be used by anyone for any purpose without restriction or permission. THAT is how a religion's texts should be: copyright is evil.