Choosing Software Freedom Costs Money Sometimes

Apparently, the company that makes my hand lotion brand uses coupons.comfor its coupons. The only way to print a coupon is to use a proprietarysoftware browser plugin called “couponprinter.exe” (which presumably implements some form of “coupon DRM).

So, as for, I actually have a price, in dollars, that it cost me to avoidproprietary software. Standing up for software freedom cost me $1.50today. :) I suppose there are some people who would argue in this situation that they have to use proprietary software, but of course I'm not one of them.

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'dsurely be proprietary software anyway.

That said, coupons.com does have a send a paper copy to a postaladdress option, and I have ordered the coupon to be sent to me. But itexpires 2014-03-31 and I'm out of hand lotion today; thus whether ornot 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 tosee if they implement ARM properly.

ARM is of course not a canonical acronym to mean what I mean here. I mean“Analog Restrictions Management”, as opposed tothe DRM(“Digital Restrictions Management”) that I was mentioned above.I doubt ARM will become a standard acronym for this, given the obviousoverloading of ARM TLA, whichis already quite overloaded.