Scilab is a open source scientific software package for numerical computations providing a powerful open computing environment for engineering and scientific applications. Since 1994 it has been distributed freely along with the source code via the Internet. It is currently used in educational and industrial environments around the world.

Scilab is one of the major component of FOSSEE (Free and Open source Software for Science and Engineering Education) project. The goal of this project is to enable the students and faculty of Science and Engineering colleges/institutes/universities across India to use open source software tools for all their computational needs, thereby improving the quality of instruction and learning.

This project is based at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB). It is funded by MHRD as part of the National Mission on Education through ICT with the thrust area being "Adaptation and deployment of open source simulation packages equivalent to MATLAB, ORCAD etc.

The three major components to this project each spearheaded by different Investigators are:

• Python for scientific computing -- Prof. Prabhu Ramachandran
• Scilab -- Prof. Mani Bhushan, Prof. Madhu Belur and Prof. Kannan Moudgalya.
• Multimedia authoring tool -- Prof. G. Sivakumar