Because it’s better:

Geoffrey De Smet: "OptaPlanner is my life’s work. As the creator and lead of OptaPlanner, I wrote most of the code (85% according to github - take that with a grain of salt). First seven years in my spare time. Then nine years for Red Hat. I am grateful to each contributor and every user. And I loved working at Red Hat for all those years. Together, we’ve built a wonderful community and a rock-solid project with a strong reputation.

But the work is far from finished. OptaPlanner has a lot more potential.

After the IBM acquisition, Red Hat’s company strategy changed. Business Automation was no longer a priority. Early 2022, Red Hat Decision Manager (the support subscription that paid for my team) moved to IBM, without OptaPlanner. By late 2022, I no longer saw a sustainable future for OptaPlanner’s development within Red Hat.

I could not just let OptaPlanner perish. So I resigned. And over the past few months, I’ve worked on a way to continue and grow the open source project. To build a company around it. An open source company dedicated to planning optimization. Luckily, I met the right people. So I could continue the project.

Over the summer of 2023, Lukáš Petrovický, Radovan Synek, and Christopher Chianelli - the core OptaPlanner engineers - joined Timefold. With their expertise we are able to accelerate the future of Planning Optimization.

So why fork OptaPlanner? I don’t own the DNS name (the optaplanner.org URL) and it’s debatable who owns the trademark. Both are required to build a sustainable business. To rescue OptaPlanner, I had no other option than to fork it."

A professional Open Source project needs a viable Open Source business model. Without paying customers, a professional Open Source project cannot survive. Great software developers don’t write code and documentation for free. Not full-time. Not as a team. Everyone needs to eat.

Red Hat sold a support subscription on OptaPlanner. Despite OptaPlanner’s world-wide usage, it struggled commercially. It’s hard to sell support on stable software. Big corporations used OptaPlanner to schedule 10k+ employees in mission critical systems, and often didn’t pay for it.

Therefore, Timefold has an Open Core model. We offer 2 editions:

We are committed to Open Source. It is a fundamental part of our company mission. Our future is to actively develop the Community Edition alongside the Enterprise Edition. The revenue of Timefold Solver Enterprise Edition pays for Timefold Solver Community Edition.

New solver features go to Community Edition, except for high-scalability features. The same logic applied during the fork of OptaPlanner: All OptaPlanner features are part of Community Edition, except for Multithreaded Solving and Nearby Selection. Those are part of Enterprise Edition. 90% of OptaPlanner users don’t use either of these. They are pure high-scalability features. Check if this change affects you, by searching for use of moveThreadCount or NearbyDistanceMeter in your code. We proactively made this change now, so we never have to move features from the Community Edition to the paid version in the future. Once it’s open source, it remains open source.

Yes, except for the branding changes.

Run timefold-migration to automatically change all your code locally. It’s a quick, single command for Maven or Gradle. Then test those changes and commit them. Alternatively, apply the following changes manually.

Timefold Solver 1.x is backward compatible with OptaPlanner 8.x, except that:

All other deprecated code remains, to make upgrading easy.

Because we fold time and space to plan your operations.

Upgrade from OptaPlanner to Timefold Solver Community Edition today. It only takes 2 minutes.

Run the command below to upgrade your code automatically. Do a test run of the solver and commit the changes. If it doesn’t work, just revert it instead and submit an issue. We’ll fix it with the highest priority.

Timefold Solver 1.x does not support scoreDRL, nor is it upgraded automatically. If you’re still using scoreDRL from OptaPlanner 7.x, please upgrade to Constraint Streams first.