After general availability, GitHub’s Copilot is now available in an enterprise version. This release includes a Teams assigned license and admin controls.
While ChatGPT, the OpenAI chatbotignites the geek community (including developers), co-pilot from GitHub continues on his merry way. GitHub has announced the launch of the business version of its AI-based programming assistant. It costs $19 per user per month. It includes the same functionalities as the consumer version, but with additional controls.
Control features include privacy issues. In a statement, GitHub explains, “We don’t curate snippets, store or share your code, whether the data comes from public repositories, private repositories, non-GitHub repositories, or local files.” The publisher also highlights the flexibility of Administrators to manage licenses and assign them to different teams or units.
Persistent legal uncertainties
Recently, GitHub, Microsoft, and OpenAI (whose Codex is used by Copilot) have been accused by developers of violating their rights and licenses. Collective action has been taken and everyone is making their case. For GitHub, he emphasizes the “fair use” of licenses recognized by American case law. According to the latter, it allows a company to use copyrighted material without first obtaining permission from the copyright holder. Of course, the other party disputes this approach and some legal experts believe that this issue could put the companies using Copilot in a legal predicament regarding the generated code. GitHub attempts to circumvent this trap by testing a filter that compares code suggestions against the surrounding code of around 150 characters and GitHub’s public code. It then hides the suggestions in case of a match or “near match”.
This feature is available in the business version, which can be activated by admins with a simple button. For the record, Copilot is available as a downloadable extension for development environments such as Microsoft Visual Studio, Neovim, and JetBrains. The wizard is powered by an AI model called Codex, developed by OpenAI, which has been trained on billions of lines of public code to suggest additional lines of code and functionality based on the context of the existing code. The service had 400,000 subscribers as of August.