The open source model in geosciences and OpendTect in particular

Abstract

Open Source models have proven to be very successful for creating and maintaining high‐tech products such as operating systems and general utilities. So far, Open Source is rarely used for larger scale, high‐tech end‐user applications, which to date remain mostly closesource/proprietary. In this paper we will argue that Open Source systems can also be a good alternative for such proprietary (and expensive) systems. We believe that the future belongs to Open Source systems that provide a free base for general tasks while more advanced functionalities are offered in the form of plugins. Such plugins can either be released as free, Open Source extensions, or as proprietary, commercial ones. In this paper we describe the conversion of the closed‐source d‐Tect system into OpendTect that is both a functional Open Source seismic interpretation system and a research and development environment. Considerable intelligence, time and effort has been put in, and will remain to be put in the future, to maintain and extend the open source software. We conclude that the implementation and support of the open source model is not trivial, and requires resources and commitment to its objectives.