Ken Starks of Reglue recently published a thought-provoking entry on his blog, The Blog of Helios, suggesting that the barrier to Free Software adoption is bad documentation. He asserts that the lack of quality documentation is due to a philosophical approach to documentation writing, within the community, that he calls “good enough.” By this, he appears to mean that document authors are writing to an audience similar to themselves, ie. people who are very experienced and grok most of what is being written.
While the problem he describes is common practice and it is a problem for the adoption of free software by newbies, it is not the main barrier to the propagation of GNU/Linux. Although good documentation is important, the main reason GNU isn’t more popular is lack of OEM support.