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Programming titan GitHub has announced that its Copilot coding tool will now be made available to businesses.
Copilot was first announced earlier in 2022 to personal users, students, and some open source code project administrators. It’s designed to make coding easier and more accessible with some smart AI and some not-so-smart theft controversies.
Now, Microsoft’s service has been modified to provide businesses with “flexible license management, organization-wide policy controls, and industry-leading privacy” for $19 per user per month.
Github Copilot for Business
This is an increase over the $10 per month charged to individual users, but could potentially be a small price to pay if GitHub’s claims of 55% faster coding, better employee focus, and faster testing materialize.
“With Copilot for Business, we don’t keep code snippets, store or share your code, whether the data comes from public repositories, private repositories, non-GitHub repositories or local files,” the company’s Shuyin Zhao explained in a statement. after (opens in new tab) announce the news.
However, the move is not without controversy. A month before the announcement of a business-focused plan, a multi-billion dollar claim had been 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 it turned out that authors were not credited. This resulted in 3.6 million individual Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) violations, each valued at $2,500, totaling $9 billion.
Either way, the company seems committed to its Copilot product, with a GitHub Universe event in 2022 announcing plenty of exciting updates, including “Hey, GitHub!” voice commands that have created a much-needed accessibility boost for the industry.