DOGE claims there are 227 unused VSCode licenses in DoL (opens in new tab)

Well, that will surely balance the projected budget deficit.

As Thomas Massie put it, "over 10 years, this budget will add $20 trillion to US debt."

To even mention VSCode licenses is to be in-efficient. DOGE wasting tweets on it reeks of desperation.

This is just an embarrassing clown show.

They could just ask Trump to not go play golf on his own properties every weekend instead of digging in the couch cushions for loose change like this.

Most bulk software licenses are offered in blocks not individual seats as it is impractical or for all intents impossible to manage exact per seat licenses at scale. I'm willing to bet that those quoted numbers are for "up to" counts. For a real world example, one of the clients I consult with (a large university) where everyone has access to the Adobe Suite. There is no way they track this by individual deployment. Almost no one uses Photoshop but it is part of the suite. I'm willing to bet that doge reps cherry picked photoshop to represent bulk licenses of Adobe Suite. Then did the reverse for Office 365. When asked, most people would likely say I don't use Microsoft 365 not knowing it is word and excel and conversely when asked if they used Photoshop would say no not knowing it is Acrobat Pro.

Of course, the icing on the cake is the claim that there are unused VSCode licenses. Either they have the wrong product or they fundamentally don't have a clue. In either case auditors going to press with this claim of 227 Unused Licenses for a free product makes them look like how Musk often describes people he does not like.

How much did they spend an a faulty audit to determine there were unused licenses for a free product?

And how many unused Linux licenses?!

(VSCode is under, essentially, the MIT license; my guess is that someone entered a dummy number into some license management tool.)

This is the really nice thing about OSS: if you don't like it, you can get back all the money you paid for it.

That reminds me, it's about time to renew my VSCode license. If I knew it would be so high maintenance, I never would have paid for the three-year plan.

I have to assume they meant Visual Studio licenses, but whoever penned the tweet didn't know there was a difference between VSCode and Visual Studio. I mean, the names and logos do look pretty similar.

Extra licenses are simply an opportunity cost. Because it's so much work to license software it's usually done in a big negotiation that estimates how many licenses are going ot be used. Further, the licenses are often spread out over the whole org, with various users coming and going, and you want to have enough license slots to accomodate peak users.

(that said, if you can negotiate to only pay for active licenses, that's good)

1. Fire a bunch of employees.

2. Hey, look at all these unused licenses! More Marxist waste!!!!

(Licenses like this are usually bulk deals, btw.)