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History

How it got here​

  • 2001 — Drools begins as an open source rule engine, later growing into a full business rule management system at JBoss, and subsequently Red Hat.
  • 2006 — Drools Planner starts, and later becomes OptaPlanner.
  • 2010 — From jBPM 5 onwards, jBPM is rebuilt around the same knowledge core as Drools.
  • Drools & jBPM 6 — The KIE umbrella name is introduced, bringing the engines, tooling and shared infrastructure under one roof. This generation brought Guvnor, which evolved into the KIE Workbench and later Business Central, alongside KIE Server for execution.
  • 2019 — Kogito is announced: a continuation of Drools, jBPM and OptaPlanner, redesigned to be cloud-native. Authoring moves to KIE Tools and execution to Kogito, superseding Business Central and KIE Server.
  • July 2022 — Red Hat and IBM announce that IBM is joining the KIE community, and share their intent to move the technologies to a foundation to widen the network of collaborators (announcement).
  • January 2023 — KIE enters the Apache Incubator. The repositories move from github.com/kiegroup to github.com/apache under the incubator-kie-* prefix, the community adopts the Apache Way, and the project's home becomes kie.apache.org.
  • September 2023 — 8.44.0.Final, the last feature release under kiegroup. Patch releases followed into 2024, but the next feature release would be the first one made at Apache.
  • December 2024 — 10.0.0, the first Apache KIE release, after 15 months of work since the last release under kiegroup (announcement).
  • July 2025 — 10.1.0, the second release, adding SonataFlow and Tools to the components released together (announcement).
  • April 2026 — 10.2.0, the third release, completing the move to the next-generation editors and to Apache-compliant dependencies (announcement).

Before Apache​

For most of their history the projects were developed in the open on GitHub under the kiegroup organization, sponsored by Red Hat. They also served as the upstream for a line of commercial offerings: JBoss Enterprise BRMS 5, Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite 6, and Red Hat Process Automation Manager and Red Hat Decision Manager 7.

The kiegroup organization forked back some repositories from Apache KIE as midstreams, so that Red Hat can keep maintaining its commercial offerings based on KIE.