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Comment by Aeolun | Hacker News Reader

I found Optaplanner to be nice, but supremely unergonomic to use. I could replicate their example problems and not much else.

> All OptaPlanner features are part of Community Edition, except for Multithreaded Solving

Of course, because why not. If you can take features away from an existing thing to make more money.

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Could you elaborate on how OptaPlanner/Timefold wasn't ergonomic?

I 'd love to understand this better, so we can improve it in Timefold Community. To help deal with new problems, we're creating out-of-the-box quickstarts for common use cases: https://github.com/TimefoldAI/timefold-quickstarts

As for the Community/Enterprise split - we want to continue the open source project, but we need to eat too :)

Geoffrey (Timefold co-founder / OptaPlanner creator)

Basically, the documentation was set up so that I could come in and do a bunch of the example problems fairly easily, but the part where I model my own problem and execute/solve that was always underserved. Or it felt like that to me anyway. I don’t have a background in the theory, but I can easily see that it could solve my problems if only I could figure it out.

> As for the Community/Enterprise split - we want to continue the open source project, but we need to eat too :)

Yeah, I don’t begrudge you that. It’s just that when I see that multithreading is locked away I just know that the moment I start using the product I’ll find out my toy problems are enterprise scale. Sort of like murpheys law, but for software features.

Thanks Aeolun! We're going to improve the documentation further. I am going to take this feedback along.

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