I think the issue here is not that the project failed, but that no attempt was even made. Their repo is a clone of an open source project with the name changed and no other commits.
sounds like most of the forks of ircd to be honest.
Yeah, but those don't usually ask for $50k to do it, and then badmouth the ircd project.
If i would have seen a few commits, then i could have said "yes, it failed because..". But there were no commits.