I have been watching both Kylix and Lazarus/FreePascal over the last couple of years.
I used Kylix quite a bit, but found it largely inflexible and of course the compiler development was all done in-house by Borland, with the next version produced like a rabbit out of the hat at infrequent intervals.
Contrast this to the L/FPC project, which two years ago was in its infancy, with only the most primitive IDE, but has developed with the efforts of many developers, in a highly transparent way, and is now at nearly the state that Kylix was at two years ago (and didn't change very much except for the addition of the C++ compiler); L/FPC is now a very usable system, and you can watch it develop.
This is a tribute to the open software method of development: to my mind, this is the only sensible way to do development, with the stimulus of lots of disparate individuals all contributing in an open and free way to the project. I am very encouraged.
Success to the open developers!