Licensing
GeoCraft is licensed in a business friendly way. Viral GPL licenses and proprietary licenses would make it too difficult for people to collaborate on the project.
Contributing
GeoCraft is still rapidly evolving and we won't be able to guarantee any backward compatibility between releases (or builds) in 2008. Anyone building on top of the framework will most likely want to merge their patches back into the project to avoid the pain of maintaining a separate branch.
We need to have a Contributor Agreement so that we can ensure that the project remains 'business friendly' for anyone who wants to use it.
More details on available in the Contributor Agreement FAQ.
Development Status
We are currently actively developing the GeoCraft framework and expect to release a 1.0 version mid 2008.
Development by ConocoPhillips is driven by immediate business needs so some parts of the framework are currently receiving considerably more attention than others.
The key features of the first release will be a 'domain driven design' that models the key geoscience abstractions. We created the object model from OpenSpirit's database schema (using a code generator) and anticipate it will take several releases before the design will stabilize.
The i/o architecture will theoretically allow development of connectors to any geoscience datastore. GeoCraft will ship with basic read/write of LAS, SEGY and grid files. We plan to use OpenSpirit to connect to proprietary datastores.
Simple lightweight viewers for volumes, logs and horizons already exist. They will evolve, as needed, to support the projects we are working on.