In the end I just kept quiet about the fact that it ships in all the Linux package repos.
(Just to be clear, I fully support what Bram did here)
I can't prove it, but I am willing to bet my entire salary that the costs of all the new extra bureaucratic overhead introduced for small purchases, nullified or even exceeded all their savings, when the remaining engineers and managers paid six figures have to spend more of their time writing, reviewing and approving paperclip orders instead of you know, running the company, fulfilling customer demands and innovating.
I'm pretty new to this, but I have a feeling these are all the signs of a company it's worth jumping ship from ASAP as there's no chance of things improving back from this. Sure, AMD managed to turn the ship around with cost cutting, but our CEO is not Lisa Su, he's a boomer who cuts where the clueless $BIG_4 consultants tell him to cut, and big_4 doesn't care about innovation or the company being relevant in 10 years, they care about showing some immediate results/positive cash to justify their outrageous rates.
When you're being outcompeted and outmaneuvered it's important to slow down and make sure you save a few dollars wherever possible, apparently.
On Linux, this is commonly accomplished using Red Hat Satellite [1], although many other tools are also available to use instead.
Getting approval to install something like Vim can literally take months of effort and arguing.
[1] https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_satellite/6...
But if you wanted to install it separately on a computer that didn't have it already, then you'd need to get it “approved.”
limitations on what you can install on such machines can be quite draconian, including forbidding anything that IT Security and similar departments may not like.