Careful license choice and intentionally crippling things such that they are objectively useless unless you meet the exact needs that I have.
I've kind of given up on elemental-ircd and left it unmaintained and archived, but I would probably send a job application in to that place if said unicorn startup happened. A few people have tried to take over elemental in the past, but as a whole the IRC ecosystem is on a downturn so they don't last long. It's a complicated situation though. At some level I'd be shocked that they managed to turn that pile of shit into something usable!
How do you ensure that's not the case? Careful license choice, "you're on your own" wording or something else?
Like, if someone created a unicorn startup rivaling Slack using Elemental-IRCd, how would you react?
(I have massive respect for anyone maintaining an ircd, btw, having attempted to contribute to one a long time ago)