Possibly the interviewers expected you to say that Scilab is as good as Matlab in

quality and reliability, before talking about the price, open nature, etc. Being
free itself may be a sufficient reason for some, but not for everyone. I always
quote the talk, "Use of Scilab for space mission analysis" by
Thierry MARTIN of CNES, available through
http://www.scilab.org/content/view/full/1128. I argue that if the extremely
successful Ariane programme can rely upon Scilab, so can many other projects. I
point out that many of India's satellites have been placed on the orbit by Ariane.

The following additional information may be useful for students from India: After
mentioning the above talk, I gratefully acknowledge how the Ariane programme has
helped place our satellites on the orbit when others refused this help for some
reason or other. This usually touches an emotional chord of most Indians and
generally Scilab becomes more acceptable to most.

I point out that Scilab uses LAPACK, just as Matlab does. I tell them that Scilab
uses some of the state of the art packages like ODEPACK and DASSL, some of which
may not be available in Matlab itself. I also point out that the licensing
restrictions of some excellent open source software packages will prevent them
being included from a commercial software package like Matlab - no such
restrictions exist for using them with Scilab. As a result, Scilab may actually
turn out to be better than Matlab in some areas.

One budding Indian entrepreneur came up with a product to search videos on the
basis of emotions. When he wanted to release it for public use, he found that he
would need a version of Matlab with a lot of permissions and that this license
would cost Rs. 1.5 crore (about 300,000 USD). He started exploring alternate
methods. In the mean time, a similar product was released by a competitor. The
entrepreneur had to close his company as a result, having lost the first mover
advantage. Through this real story, one should point out that it costs A LOT OF
MONEY for the corporates to use Matlab - most people (especially those who rely on
pirated software) do not seem to be aware of the price of Matlab for commercial
use. One should conclude this story by saying that reliance on Matlab makes the
lives of all startups and small and medium scale enterprises extremely difficult.

In addition to numerical computations, etc., one can use Scilab for data
acquisition and control also. This will be extremely useful for selling their
hardware devices as well.

I find the network based licensing method unacceptable to conduct lab exams using
Matlab. To prevent the students from downloading software available elsewhere, I
have to turn off the network access. But this will disable Matlab use. Scilab has
no such difficulties.

Finally, one also gets the benefits of a lot of community driven and Government
funded projects that restrict their funding only to open source tools. For
example, see http://scilab.in/Completed_Books, where one can access Scilab Textbook
Companions for close to 70 popular textbooks. Many more are in progress. Spoken
tutorials on Scilab is another very useful resource. These are available through
http://spoken-tutorial.org/Study_Plans_Scilab and better still, http://spoken-
tutorial.org/New.

WHen I woeked with project of filtering circuits one very interesting advantage I
found
in scilab was in the manipulation of polynomials in theis transfer function. Look
that

s=poly(0,'s')
n=s-1
d=s^2+2*s+5
h=n/d

In filtering projects, is possible to project any filter from a low pass one
transforming
the variable in the polinomial. Look that

w=poly(0,'w')
s=2/w
now type again
n=s-1
d=s^2+2*s+5
h=n/d

Voila! The transformed transfer function

Scilab lets you write more than one function in a single file and there is no need
to name the file the same as the function contained in the file. This makes your
code modular. An entire module along with the functions and variables and constants
can be loaded into the workspace with a single command. On the other hand, MATLAB
requires that each function file contain only one externally visible function and
its name be the same as the name of the function it contains. It relies on this to
search for the appropriate function file and load it into the workspace.
Scilab is open source, there is an opportunity to be selected for Google Summer of
Code projects each year as Scilab has been regularly selected to take students.
Scilab is a little behind MATLAB when it comes to translating Scilab code to
embeddable C/C++, but I may be a little out of touch here as I haven't been
following it as much as I used to (having shifted focus to Python recently).