Hi all, been a while since I posted the degoog beta, been head down working on all my apps.
Some of you may know me for Jotty and Cronmaster on top of degoog, hi friends!
- You can find the core repo here: https://github.com/degoog-org/degoog
- The official extensions repo here: https://github.com/degoog-org/official-extensions
- And a little showcase of community made extensions: https://degoog-org.github.io/community-extensions/
Degoog is a search aggregator meant to be plug and play, the app itself is extremely light (about 50mb to 70mb ram usage whilst idle, biggest spike I've seen recently has been about 100mb in usage), and then there's a very comprehensive extension system where you can create engines, plugins and transports (transports are the way I've named systems to fetch data, headless browsers, curl alternatives and so on).
The app has been in beta for a while and today I've released the first stable beta, so I'd love to re-announce it here and get at bit more feedback. Next post I'll make will be once it's out of beta and fully stable, trying to not spam this too much.
Little quick history for anyone who hasn't seen the first post, this was born from my PERSONAL gripes with searxng (no shades, the internet is beautiful because it's vary), can't say my project is better, it's too new to say that, but it works more for my personal preferences and hopefully it resonates with some of you too.
Let's talk about AI usage like adults please
This is NOT vibecoded, it's not AI driven and it's NOT some slop put together in 5 minutes. Some people here know me, they know I maintain my projects, I code myself and I have been a software engineer for many many years.
I actually have rejected pull requests that were very obviously vibecoded (p.s. fucking hilarious if you check the CLAUDE.md file in the repo, the PRs were riddled with these comments I force in there).
That said I obviously make some use of AI, it's 2026, dunno what you all expect, open source however is my way to escaping how my day job REQUIRES me to use AI, so it's only used for stuff I can't be bothered to do (e.g. repetitive boring tasks, documentations, tests and heavy debugging). If you have issues with this please go tell a carpenter to use a manual screwdriver and not a power drill and see if they say yes or throw it at you, thank you <3
Open source does not mean royalty free or public domain. Those individual developers who put in that labor have rights as workers, and they express them through their software licenses. It’s absolutely no different than stealing artwork or music for training data, it’s just a different medium of self expression and creativity. Your argument is like saying that since artists have digital catalogues to show off and market their work, they deserve to have it stolen for training data too.
Have you ever read an open source license? They gave away those rights, voluntarily.
If you have evidence that AI is being trained on world licensed to the contrary then by all means get exercised about those "workers" rights (right on, man,) but given the vast quantities of code released under permissive open source licenses, it's not going to change anything.
I’ve written open source code and contributed to many projects. I’m more than familiar with the licensing. Some licenses like MIT give permissive rights away to businesses for private use, but copyleft ones like GPL and AGPL families (which are massively popular) absolutely do not, not without all resultant code being open source and GPL as well which is obviously not the case with LLM generated shit. Educate yourself before spewing nonsense please
I was contributing to Open Source almost certainly before you were born, so wind your neck in kid. But, even if we suppose you are right and the GPL somehow restricts the use of licensed works for AI training (although a quick refresh on the license shows no evidence that it does) - while GPL fanatics make the most noise, it is absolutely not the most popular open source license.
GPL variants covers roughly 20% of the licensed work on Github. The vast majority of such work is permissive open-source licensed, with the MIT license covering almost 50% alone. That's because the vast majority of open source contributors are not in fact wannabe Citizen Smiths, but rather people who want, without restriction, to contribute to the advancement of computing.