But that doesn't confer "the same rights" at all. To get the over 1,000 rights and benefits of marriage at the federal level it has to be called a "marriage," not a "civil union," not a "domestic partnership," not "BFFs." The word marriage is what confers those rights.

To get equal rights you have to get equal access to the word. That's why gay people find the lukewarm alternatives like civil unions unacceptable, not because they fetishize the word "marriage," but because the government does.

I own a small business, a bookstore, and I recently switched to OpenOffice.org from MS Office for Mac. For the stuff I do, accounting in a spreadsheet and writing letters, creating forms, printing address labels and things in a word processor, I can't discern any functional difference. There may be more options or pretty things in MS Office, but are they worth a couple of hundred dollars from people like me who don't need them? I also prefer OO.o to iWork for a lot of the same reasons. My business is really really small though (I just hired my first employee) so maybe I'll see the advantages of proprietary software when (or if) it gets any bigger.

I quit using Office 2008 for Mac at my business (a used bookstore) in favor of OpenOffice.org a few months ago and I have noticed zero functional difference. Maybe I'm just not doing enough advanced things (it's a really small business), but for an average user OpenOffice.org works fine. Hypothetically, if they decided to put ads in it you can bet I'd go right to Gnumeric and Abiword. If Microsoft has decided that consumers are so unsophisticated as to just use whatever comes with the machine without looking at the alternatives, how can they expect a significant number of those people to know the difference between the paid and "free" versions of Office? Won't people see Office at the store for $200 or whatever and think "That piece of crap that came with my computer and has all the ads? No thanks." Of course, it's a better idea than WordPad was, I guess.