Programming giant GitHub has announced that the Copilot encoder will now be made available to businesses.
First announced earlier in 2022 to personal users, students, and some maintainers of open source code projects, Copilot is designed to help make coding easier and more accessible with some clever AI and some controversy over not-so-smart theft.
Now, the Microsoft-owned service has been modified to offer “flexible license management, enterprise-grade policy controls, and industry-leading privacy” to businesses at a cost of $19 per user, per month.
GitHub Copilot for Business
That’s an increase from the $10 per month they’re charged for individual users, but it’s likely a small price to pay if GitHub’s claims of 55% faster coding, better focus on workers, and faster testing come true.
“With Copilot for Business, we won’t keep code fragments, store, or share your code regardless of whether the data is from public repositories, private repositories, non-GitHub repositories, or local files,” the company’s Shuyin Zhao explained in a post. (Opens in a new tab) Announcing the news.
But the movement is not without controversy. A month before the business-focused plan was announced, a multibillion-dollar claim was filed against GitHub for its 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 the authors were found not to be credited. This resulted in 3.6 million individual DMCA violations, each rated at $2,500, totaling $9 billion.
The company appears to be dedicated to its Copilot product regardless, with the GitHub Universe 2022 event announcing plenty of exciting updates, including a “Hey, GitHub!” Voice commands have created a much-needed accessibility enhancement in the industry.