GitHub launches Copilot for businesses

Programming titan GitHub has announced its Copilot coding tool 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 not-so-clever theft controversies.

Now, the Microsoft-owned service has been tweaked to deliver “flexible license management, organization-wide policy controls, and industry-leading privacy” to businesses at the cost of $19 per user per month.

Github Copilot for businesses

This is an increase from the $10 per month charged for individual users, but could potentially be a small price to pay if GitHub’s claims of 55% faster coding, better worker focus, and faster testing come true.

“With Copilot for Business, we won’t retain code snippets, store or share your code regardless if 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 new tab) announcing the news.

The movement is not without controversy, though. A month before the announcement of a business-focused plan, a multi-billion dollar claim against GitHub had been made in relation to 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 it was found that authors were not being attributed. This resulted in 3.6 million individual violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), each rated at $2500, totalling $9 billion. 

The company appears to be dedicated to its Copilot product regardless, with a 2022 GitHub Universe event announcing plenty of exciting updates, including “Hey, GitHub!” voice commands that created a much-needed accessibility boost to the industry.