Raising the Bar With Open Source Software

The geophysical community has spawned several open-source initiatives -- or maybe the open-source community has spawned several geophysical initiatives. Seismic Unix, Madagascar, CPSeis -- all for seismic processing! How do these help us besides providing students a sandbox in which to play and learn about the seismic method? They help in a couple of ways:

1. They provide the commodity processing capability at no charge
2. They provide a base-case for validation of other software

COMMODITY CAPABILITY

If you are willing to put up with the quirks of the software, you can put together a reasonable system with one of these packages, and set off to process data! You may not be the fastest kid on the block, but you can do the job. This capability raises the bar for commercial software vendors. No longer is "a complete system" good enough. The commercial system must have a compelling set of features that make you want to pay the fee. Raising the bar is a good thing for the geophysical community.

VALIDATION

Any student (or professional) working on a software algorithm now has two or three different packages to compare results with. Validation of the mathematics and the programming techniques are critical for making sure that you haven't made a sign error or a typo in your code. Of course, everything isn't available, but enough is there for many algorithms to be tested against.

More on this subject later!