The purpose of the consortium is not to create technical innovations but to capture existing and mature technical innovations into a software platform that can used as a launching pad for member organizations to create new and proprietary innovations.
The scope of the platform offering of the consortium is nothing less than the entire problem domain as suggested by the needs of subsurface modeling. At a minimum this scope includes seismic interpretation, gridding, property modeling, reservoir simulation and a lot more. What is envisioned is a complete seismic processing to reservoir simulation workflow.
The oil and gas industry in general and shared earth modeling in particular are places where very little open source influence is felt. The software industry as a whole has been transformed by open source and there can be no doubt that shared earth modeling would greatly benefit from open source if various obstacles, both real and imagined, can be overcome.
Take a moment to imagine an environment in which simple problems have simple solutions. Imagine being able to focus engineering effort and increasingly scarce capital on new and unsolved problems instead of squandering it on problems that have been solved over and over again. Imagine a frictionless and secure transfer of technology and data between and within organizations. Imagine a scalable collaboration of industry experts where those experts are focused entirely on the problem at hand and not on overcoming the various incompatibilities of their tool sets. Not only is such an environment possible, we believe it within reach.
This journey has just begun. We are a long way from realizing the vision. The reason for starting down this path is that, should this effort succeed, the upside for member organizations would be huge.
The consortium is a repository for running code to which all members of the consortium have access. Members are free to exploit this code for commercial purposes or internal use without incurring additional license fees and without suffering restrictive licensing schemes. Members pay dues for membership and donate code and labor to the consortium. Members can be any type of organization whether oil company, service company, software publisher or independent consultant. Membership dues are scaled to the size of the member organization and its desire to participate. The influence of the member on the consortium is also scaled in the same way.
The overarching purpose of the consortium is not to produce standards but to produce running code. Running code, when widely distributed and freely available, becomes a de facto standard. This code will have a type of open source license which is amenable to commercial use and will not in any way taint proprietary code with which it is mixed.
Membership in the consortium is open to all interested parties. Send us an email to receive white papers and other information regarding the formation of this open source movement. We are now at the very beginning of the long arc of this idea. Plan to get involved.
Open Shared Earth, LLC
9719 Candelaria RD NE #21898
Albuquerque, NM 87111-9211
+1 (505) 796-4073