Free software moves the goalposts of freedom towards "sufficiently clued in user can operate and maintain free software", not "everyone of any skillset has a viable path to control their program". Programming freedom is the harder goal. Anyone can dump source code and say "yeah it's GPL now."
That's how it worked out that so much of the early stuff was, in respects small and large, "software for free, documentation for sale". There's no mandate for usability or conceptual simplicity. And we've only gotten better in the sense of having more developers interested in that stuff.
That's how it worked out that so much of the early stuff was, in respects small and large, "software for free, documentation for sale". There's no mandate for usability or conceptual simplicity. And we've only gotten better in the sense of having more developers interested in that stuff.