This presentation introduces the UniTime open-source project to the OW2 community. UniTime started back in 2000 as a research project with collaboration between universities in Europe and North America. It has become a software solution that covers various educational timetabling and scheduling needs of a university, including course timetabling, examination timetabling, student and instructor scheduling, and event management. Over 100 institutions around the world are using it.

The UniTime project successfully transitioned from a very research-oriented start to a practical, open-source, web-based solution that can be used out of the box. However, it still has a solid background in research. Many related research papers have been published, and we co-organized an international timetabling competition, allowing us to contribute valuable timetabling benchmarks back to the research community.

The UniTime project has a tiny core team: only four people. In the second part of the presentation, we would like to concentrate on how our project is being funded and the current pitfalls of running such a project, especially in higher education and their procurement processes geared toward large commercial companies.