> are you planning a hosted version

Not in the near term. Right now I am focused on developing Hister rather than operating a hosted service. There are already plenty of centralized hosted search engines, so my longer term interest is in federation and distributed search. I want to make the core system mature first.

> would've been great with a more liberal license

It depends on how do you define liberal. =] I chose AGPLv3+ because I want Hister to remain free software and available to their users.