A brief history of Scilab

In the introduction of the last Scilab Conference, I presented a few facts and figures about the history of Scilab. You can watch the video on Youtube:

... or simply read further.

Summary of the previous episodes

What you see here is a picture from the last Scilab community event in France, in the very same room. It was in 2015. 

We had an excellent keynote from Roberto di Cosmo on the advantage of open-source for the reproducibility of the research.

The three best presentations of the event (based on the votes of the audience):

-       French Nuclear Agency CEA: Migration from Matlab to Scilab

-       Italian partner Evidence: State Machine Simulation with Scilab/Xcos

-       French Space Agency CNES: Scilab for Philae Landing

It was a very successful event. And every year before that, we had Scilab User Conferences, since 2009. from the days at INRIA, in the French research.

Scilab: A brief history of Science

Scilab origins are coming from the 80’s and 90’s. And its expansion goes far beyond our development team.

INRIA - The days in the research

Scilab formally started in 1994, but its premises call back to the very expertise of INRIA.

INRIA is the French research institute for computer science. INRIA works closely with the industry and has assisted in the creation of over 160 startups. Scilab is one of them.

Scilab Consortium – Driving the Roadmap

The very first Scilab consortium celebrated its launch on 16 May 2003 with the first meeting of its founder members:

Industrialization – When Open Source means Quality

Since 2008, our goal was to industrialize the development of Scilab, to conduct a transition from the research to a large industrial adoption. A new generation of computer scientists took over the development of Scilab.

The first version of Scilab 5 was released in the end of 2008.

Scilab Enterprises – supporting your Applications

As the industry was starting to adopt Scilab, there was a rising need for services around the open-source software. This was the reason for the creation of Scilab Enterprises. The whole development team switched over from INRIA to Scilab Enterprises in 2012.

As we were getting closer to our users, we found out that Scilab was standing out on a particular use: For the development of application.

And that on this vertical, our main competitor wasn’t so much Matlab, but Excel!

Scilab Cloud – for Application Deployment

Next logical step: the Cloud

Sanofi was the first customer of Scilab Cloud.

Research projects – To develop Scilab further

Building an ecosystem of industrial and academic partners revealed critical for the expansion of Scilab. But also, it provided a way of funding the open-source development.

• ARGO – A major project for Xcos, on Embedded Code Generation
• COLOC – Further collaborations with our friends in High Performance Computing
• CLARITY – Open-source ecosystem for Model-Based System Engineering
• MECASIF – A first taste of Finite Element Analysis, and the development of Reduced Order Modeling, a foundation for the future

Why ESI? Or how to exist on a $6 billion market

The simulation and analysis market is quite concentrated, and consolidation is on-going, creating bigger players in 2017

• Siemens acquired CD-Adapco ($1 billion) and Mentor Graphics ($4.5 billion)
• Dassault acquired Exa ($400 million)

Source: CIMdata 2016 

MathWorks basically represents a monopoly on his specific segment. Given this situation, our best chance to develop Scilab was to partner with an established player.

ESI Group is a pioneer in the domain of Numerical Simulation and Virtual Prototyping. With the experience of OpenFOAM, ESI Group has already demonstrated its commitment to open-source software for engineers and scientists.

Scilab Usage throughout the Community

Scilab Usage – per Application (on a sample of 100k users of Scilab)

Scilab Usage – per Domain incl. Education (on a sample of 130k users of Scilab)

Scilab Usage – per Industry (on a sample of 50k users of Scilab)

Find out more on our new website: