Apparently, the company that makes my hand lotion brand uses coupons.com for its coupons. The only way to print a coupon is to use a proprietary software browser plugin called "couponprinter.exe" (which presumably implements some for of coupon DRM).

So, as of today, I actually have the price, in dollars, that it cost me to avoid proprietary software. Standing up for software freedom cost me $1.50 today. :)

The interesting thing is that this program has a OS X and Windows version, but nothing for iOS and Android/Linux. Now, if they had the latter, it'd surely be proprietary software anyway.

(That said, coupons.com does have a "send a paper copy to a postal address" option), and I have ordered the coupon to be sent to me. But it expires March 31st and I'm out of hand lotion today, so whether or not I get to use the coupon before expiration is an open question.)

I'm curious to try to order as many copies as possible of this coupon just to see if they implement ARM [0] properly.

[0] ARM is of course not an acronymn that's used to mean what I mean here, which is "Analog Restrictions Management", as opposed to the DRM I was talking about before, "Digital Restrictions Management".