I think he captured a pile of spiritual value.
The way budgets and head count works, it may have been easier/possible for his boss to say "use your labor/time to work on this" than to justify a specific purchase of the off the shelf product. They're rockin', right now, rather than still waiting for a budget approval that might not come through.
He works for a library, which is a front line service to the community. I imagine he gets a different personal spiritual/civic ROI doing this for the library than if he worked for Office Depot and did something similar (not that there's anything wrong with that). Direct service to the community just seems more ... service like.
No, I'm not joking.
The library would be thrilled with the free one, and tell him his company isn't an approved supplier, sorry, but if he can offer regular maintenance contracts and guarantee spares for the life of the contract, and a service level agreement, and electrical safety certification and accessibility guideline approval then they'd be happy to submit his company to the review board...
Also, he's currently in a job where he can take 15-20 days to tinker with something and people approve of it. In your situation he'd be in a job where he was continually obliged to work on maintenance and support of dozens of hacked together kiosks.
This is also makes far easier for the library to try this because you can offer trial period/monthly software subscription , and they could reuse some hardware they have their(pc,display) , to make the initial investment relatively small, so you need a lot less bureaucratic approvals.
All things being equal, when given the choice between a 25k system and a 20k system that a business needs - they choose 20k, no matter how much of a markup it is. Value to the customer is still value even at 500% markup.