Hi guys,

This Tuesday (2-MAR-2013), a few technical changes will occur due to Drools Planner's namechange.

1) The github URL for Drools Planner will change from
https://github.com/droolsjbpm/drools-planner
to
https://github.com/droolsjbpm/optaplanner

2) The groupId's and artifactId's will change from
org.drools.planner:drools-planner-*
to
org.optaplanner:optaplanner-*

3) The directory names will change accordingly.

If you have a clone/fork of the Drools Planner repository with changes,
it's best to send in any changes in a pull request for master by Monday evening
if you want to avoid a having to port those changes manually.

This namechange is the technical preparation for the more public announcement we'll make in a few weeks.
To avoid speculation, you can read about the full explanation of the rename to OptaPlanner below.
https://github.com/droolsjbpm/optaplanner-website/blob/master/community/DroolsPlannerRenamed.md

With kind regards,
Geoffrey De Smet

Drools Planner renamed to OptaPlanner

As of version 6.0.0.Beta1, Drools Planner has been renamed to OptaPlanner.

Why change the name?

OptaPlanner is the new name for Drools Planner. OptaPlanner is now standalone, but can still be optionally combined with the Drools rule engine for a powerful declarative approach to planning optimization.

OptaPlanner has graduated from the Drools project to become a top-level JBoss Community project.
- OptaPlanner (the planning engine) joins its siblings Drools (the rule engine) and jBPM (the workflow engine) in the KIE group.
Our commitment to Drools hasn't changed.
- The efficient Drools rule engine is still the recommended way to do score calculation.
- Alternative score calculation options, such as pure Java calculation (no Drools), also remain fully supported.

How will this affect your business?

From a business point of view, there's little or no change:

The mission remains unchanged:
- We're still 100% committed to put business resource optimization in the hands of normal Java developers.
The license remains unchanged (Apache Software License 2.0). It's still the same open source license.
Red Hat is considering support subscriptions offerings for OptaPlanner as part of its BRMS and BPM platforms.
- A Tech Preview of OptaPlanner is targeted for BRMS 6.0.

What has changed?

The website has changed to http://www.optaplanner.org
The distributions artifacts have changed name:
- Jar names changes:
  - drools-planner-core-*.jar is now optaplanner-core-*.jar
  - drools-planner-benchmark-*.jar is now optaplanner-benchmark-*.jar
- Maven identification groupId's and artifactId's changes:
  - groupId org.drools.planner is now org.optaplanner
  - artifactId drools-planner-core is now optaplanner-core
  - artifactId drools-planner-benchmark is now optaplanner-benchmark
- As usual, for more information see the Upgrade Recipe in the download zip.
The API's namespace has changed. As usual, see the Upgrade Recipe on how to deal with this efficiently.
- Starting from 6.1.0.Final, OptaPlanner will have a 100% backwards compatible API.
OptaPlanner gets its own IRC channels on Freenode: #optaplanner and #optaplanner-dev