About us

OpendTect software consists of an open source part and an (optional) closed source part. The open source part originates with dGB Earth Sciences who act as custodians of the system and take care of new developments, testing, releasing and supporting the system. As with all open source software systems anyone can contribute to bring the software to a higher level. The closed source part of OpendTect consists of commercial plugins. These are developed by a growing number of oil company developers as in-house products and by software vendors such as: dGB Earth Sciences, ARK CLS, Earthworks and Geokinetics, as commercial plugins.

OpendTect started life as an open source seismic interpretation system back in 2003. It was in 2009, however, that the General Public License (GPL) was adopted and the system became truly open source. Between Sept. 1st. 2009 and 31 Dec. 2010, OpendTect was downloaded over 40,000 times implying that today it ranks amongst the most widely used seismic interpretation systems in the world.

We adopted the open source model to create a truly open platform for seismic interpretation. While seismic interpretation software had advanced considerably over the last few years, the industry still suffered from a lack of integration between different applications and a lack of input from users. Technology advances were also being blocked through a system that was monopolized by just a few players. If you wanted to launch a new technology, you had to build a complete interpretation system as well. In other words, vendors had to spend 99% of their time on building / maintaining the environment while only 1% was spent on creating truly new technology. We wanted to shorten the gap between academic research and operational deployment, and enable geo-scientists in the industry to deploy bright ideas in a professional environment.