The development titan GitHub has announced that its Copilot coding tool will now be made available to businesses.
First announced earlier in 2022 to individuals, students, and some open source code project maintainers, Copilot is designed to make coding easier and more accessible with some clever AI and some not-so-clever theft controversies.
Now, the Microsoft-owned service has been enhanced to give businesses “flexible licensing management, organization-wide policy control, and industry-leading privacy” for $19 per user per month.
Github Copilot for businesses
This is an increase from the $10/month charged to individual users, but it could potentially be a small price to pay if GitHub’s claims of 55% faster coding, better employee focus, and faster testing come true.
“With Copilot for Business, we will not retain code snippets, store or share your code, whether the data is from public, private, non-GitHub repositories or local files,” explained Shuyin Zhao of the company in Post (opens in a new tab) announcing the news.
The move is not without controversy, however. A month before the announcement of the business-oriented plan, a multi-billion dollar claim was filed against GitHub for lack of attribution and copyright infringement.
The service uses billions of lines of existing code written by human programmers to translate natural language into code, but authors have not been credited. This allegedly led to 3.6 million individual Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) violations, each worth $2,500, for a total of $9 billion.
Regardless, the company seems to be committed to its Copilot product, with the GitHub Universe 2022 event announcing a number of exciting updates, including “Hey GitHub!” voice commands that have created a much-needed increase in accessibility in the industry.