I think he means that at some point Borland has been providing Delphi 6 and later Delphi 7 personal editions for free. I belive that was the time when delphi 2007 and later 2009 came out.
The reason why I started using Delphi in the first place was becouse I got first Delphi 6 and later Delphi 7 for free. And since at the time FPC was still early in its development and quite unstable Delphi was one of rare fully featured and stable Objective Pascal development tools for Windows.
If at that time I would have to pay for Delphi I would have never started programming in Objective Pascal but probably still banging my head in C++ (its sintax is quite inlogical to me) in which I first started programming or even quit on my atempt to become programer.
The reason why I'm still Delphi supporter even if it is far from perfect is that if it wasn't for Delphi I wouldn't be here today.