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?
As far as I can tell, the Musk reality distortion field around DOGE is collapsing. Multiple agency heads specifically told their employees to ignore the request for 5 status updates, many employees in other departments simply didn't comply. At best Trump's support was "they should be fired, maybe". The DOGE site already made significant changes to their report that shows cuts, since basically all of the ones in the top 10 contained significant errors that were trivially identified. Republican leaders talking to their constituents are getting significant pushback about Musk's "asshole manager" attitude.
None of this is to say Musk won't keep messing things up, and may get more real support from Trump in the future, but the reality distortion field that allowed him to go into agencies with US Marshalls a few weeks ago is not working any more.
I think one of the reasons for DOGE is to provide Trump with some deniability. Elon screws the pooch hard enough, Trump disowns the whole thing. Trump will never provide more than tentative support.
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)
Well, you have a lot of folks who are fans of the clown and their show, so you have to continually apply pressure and gather receipts you commit to the historical record. When you call them fools, the homework has already been done.
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?