There were some other issues then (I worked for Borland at the time, QAing Kylix) including not really understanding the FOSS community and GPL-the-social-movem

There were some other issues then (I worked for Borland at the time, QAing Kylix) including not really understanding the FOSS community and GPL-the-social-movement part very well. There was a particularly big flap over them not stripping the corporate audit clause from the free Kylix Open Edition version targeted at OSS dev; and another regarding enforcing the mandatory "Made with Kylix Open Edition" splash screen that was linked into your app at the compiler level, since all the library code was technically modifiable per licensing. I also seem to recall that they managed to standardize on Red Hat 7.2, which I think had the much maligned gcc 2.96 fork in it and possibly an older glibc, and then had problems with later kernel/glibc/something along those lines versions such that you were locked into the "bad" version of Red Hat using it. I probably have some of the tech details jumbled 16 years later, but the TL;DR was that the development community for Linux is nothing like the development community for Windows, especially back then. There were simply different cultural expectations and a hugely diverse set of environments to target, along with a swiftly moving ecosystem to link against. Upshot, Kylix more or less flopped and Borland switched gears to Java/JBuilder-based IDEs for C++ compilation (C++BuilderX), then back around full circle later focusing on single-platform IDEs for .NET/native Windows.