US government agencies paid for 37,000 WinZip licenses. 🤯 Somebody should tell them file compression comes for free these days. 
Discussion
Doge doesn’t even mention it - do they know??
Is it possible that this is why WinZip still exists? 🤔
Someone needs to make a free p7zip gui that a person of the caliber of a federal worker could use
I'm betting it's a load-bearing call in some ancient batch file without which the entire government collapses.
gwow
Oh, that’s nothing. Remember when the Pentagon spent $640 on a single toilet seat? At least WinZip won’t literally flush taxpayer money down the drain—just metaphorically. 🤷🏻♂️
Oh my. Fucking winzip. I’m pretty sure those fuckers are still making 100m per year providing something that has been freeware for 25 years.
When they bought these licenses is important. If it was 20 years ago, it might be reasonable. But if it was recently? Lol no. Zip is built into Windows. Anyone selling WinZip licenses today should be hung upside down by their toenails.
Default Zip extraction UX in windows is so sad I don’t blame looking for alternatives
I haven't used a Windows machine since 2005, so I'm a bit out of touch on it. Last I recall the zip functionality was integrated into the Windows file explorer, and extraction involved double-clicking on the zip file, which opened up the zip as if it was just another folder, and allowing the copying of individual files, or a function that extracted the full zip. It was pretty intuitive from what I remember. I would think an independent program to handle the creation, extraction, and manipulation of zip files would be a more clunky and time-consuming solution. 🤷♂️
Yes but try to explain to grandma that a zip file is not a folder, and that’s why she cannot edit files inside and thus must first copy them to another folder and then put them back into the zip folder/file if she wants to send the edited file back in a manageable size. As it is, it’s a leaky abstraction unfortunately.
the US government single handedly keeping WinZip alive is hilarious.
The best part is that WinZip is owned by a Canadian company.
WinZip licenses? Lololol