what is the advantage of scilab compared to matlab

[kannan]

sai kiran wrote
> 
> Hi Scilab,
> 
> Myself Saikiran, a research scholar, IIT Kanpur, India. Last week I
> attended an interview. They put up a question that why you shifted to
> scilab from matlab.
> I simply told them that scilab is open source and matlab is closed source.
> They told that is not the right answer and hence i am not selected in the
> interview.
> So please could u guys tell me, what are other major advantages of scilab
> over matlab.
> 
> Thanks and Regards,
> Saikiran
> IIT Kanpur
> 

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.

Kannan Moudgalya
IIT Bombay



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