Sadly this wasn't a one off - Element has repeatedly lost deals to larger SIs who take our own FOSS software and compete with us with it, and win because they are better connected and don't have any of the costs of actually maintaining the software and so can charge a lower price. Hence shifting to AGPL to make it less desirable for SIs to commercialise us without first agreeing an AGPL exception.

A better approach would be if the purchaser mandated that the upstream project has to participate in the deal rather than being disintermediated by the SI, but we've seen very few instances of that happening.