I don't think finding developers is my first obstacle, I have a bunch of people who have contacted me and shown interest in participating.

The problem is the logistics of an open search project that is a web service with serious hardware requirements. I think the minimum hardware requirements is about 14 Gb of RAM, that's without any real data loaded into the system. Testing is awkward and cumbersome, and the data logistics are a real headache even on the same network as the production instance.

To even run the search engine, you need a few hundred megabytes of language models, as well as a probably few gigabytes of website data to conduct meaningful testing. The production instance has a disk footprint of about half a terabyte.