The Road to Open Source: Sharing a Ten Years Experience in Building OpendTect, the Open Source Seismic Interpretation Software

OpendTect is a complete Open Source seismic interpretation system, available for already ten years. We demonstrate that Open Source as a business model can be successful in the oil and gas industry provided you pay extra attention to a few key points. We discuss the importance of the Freemium business model and use our experience to list important topics to consider when going Open Source. It covers a wide range of issues going from communication with the users’ community and stimulation of research and development to the architecture of the software code itself.