With Gnome 3.0, the open source desktop may well be stepping out on its own for the first time -- heading down a path it's beating itself, and not one created by proprietary software. And this is a major, major departure from how things have been done up to now, at least when it comes to the contemporary Linux desktop.

It's astonishingly risky. When it comes to user-interface design, many of us mistake ease-of-use for familiarity. But this only underlines how important familiarity is. And by experimenting with essentially radical new technologies, Gnome may be making it even harder for newcomers to switch to open source.

Everything that's been fought for, and won, on the open source desktop over the past few years, might be lost in a few strokes as people boot their new desktop Linux installations and utter that terrible word/phrase: "Whyditdodat?"

There's another truism here too, and it applies to the whole concept of open source experimentation: open source developers have a habit of scratching their own itches, rather than those of their users. In other words open source tends to be very developer driven and developer focussed. By way of contrast, proprietary software is exclusively user-focussed. It has to be, or it simply couldn't exist. Nobody would buy a proprietary project if it didn't do what they want. Open source has no such hindrance.