Free/open source software: an alternative for engineering students

Networked or stand-alone computational environments that are available as free or open-source software are very useful for teaching engineering courses. The cost of implementation of these environments is essentially that of the underlying personal computer (PC) hardware. The necessary software, of very high quality, is available free of charge through the Internet. Our purpose is to show that free or open source software can be used as a good alternative for engineering students. The main focus is on Scilab, a numerical software package. Often installed on machines running the Linux operating system, it is a powerful tool that is useful in teaching numerical methods or computationally intensive disciplines. Also, presented are other free software packages, GSL (GNU Scientific Library) and LaTeX, that can be useful to the student. A package like Scilab can serve the needs of students when standard commercial mathematical software is not available.