One of the reservations the customer likely had is "will this company be around in X years?" The inferior home-grown product will continue to be supported.
Thank you for clarifying for me so elegantly. That self fulfilling prophecy does have a sense irony to it, especially given that the code is open sourced.
So basically, now the developers could decide to use it for free if they wanted? Either they will, and they'll have saved their company a lot of money, or they won't, because the traditional issues they had with it are still there. I'm not sure how either of those ends up making the developers look like they made a bad decision.
Yes, the current state of the thread now that it's been too long for any of the comments to be edited further certainly doesn't look like anyone was saying it.