It was a project without clear funding in INRIA, and an investor (who had previously been Airbus CEO iirc) created Scilab Enterprise and hired the engineers who

It was a project without clear funding in INRIA, and an investor (who had previously been Airbus CEO iirc) created Scilab Enterprise and hired the engineers who'd been developing it. This helped pay the bills and get focused on reworking the software stack. They were providing paid support but that wasn't enough, so there was a series of acquisitions until, apparently, 3ds. Source: interned there sometime along the way, met some great people.