"I found it very weird that there essentially is no way to browse the web in an open manner. So that's what I am trying to build," the founder of Stract said.
"I found it very weird that there essentially is no way to browse the web in an open manner. So that's what I am trying to build," the founder of Stract said.
The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.
Paradoxically (or not), restrictions on selling software is a fundamental violation of freedom. When the OSS movement says free, it means freedom as in free to do what you want, not free as in free beer. Of course, that freedom also includes the freedom to give it away.
So in practice, that usually results in exactly what you lament: free software with a business model on top to support its development and pay programmers so they can eat.
I think what would be interesting is to get everyone who self hosts this do part of the indexing. As in, find some way to split the indexing over self-hosted instances running this search engine.
Then make sure "the internet" is divided somewhat reasonably.
Kind of what crypto does, but instead producing the indexes instead of nothing.
That would give random strangers (at least partial) control over what is indexed and how and you'd have to trust them all. I'm not sure that's a great idea.
It's got a fully independent search index according to the README. SearxNG, LibreX, LibreY, etc. just takes results from multiple search engines and combines them.
Mh, but there are (were?) other search-engines where you could crawl the web yourself, I relember doing that for the lolz, can't rember the name, though.
We recommend everyone to use the hosted version at stract.com, but you can also follow the steps outlined in CONTRIBUTING.md to setup the engine locally.