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GitHub Copilot for Business is now available
- breckenedge 4y agoAn extra $9/mo for: * Simple license management * Organization-wide policy management * Industry-leading private * Corporate proxy support Wow. Who’s going to pay a 90% premium for these features? Edit: OK seems like different marketing pages have different features. The list above comes from https://github.com/features/copilot/ https://github.com/features/copilot/. Still seems like a very steep increase over the base. And I cannot believe there are only 400ish companies using copilot.
- das_keyboard 4y agoI think the privacy part would be a big part for some organizations, even if I do not know what this really means or what this implies for the other plans.
- tccole 4y ago9 bucks per developer isn’t that much. I getting a developer to be 5 percent faster is a huge gain for just 9 dollars.
- paxys 4y agoSure, but the harder part is measuring whether the developer is actually 5% faster. Otherwise you can make the same case for every $10/mo subscription service in the world, and so we should all be operating at infinite efficiency.
- aleph_minus_one 4y ago> Sure, but the harder part is measuring whether the developer is actually 5% faster. Otherwise you can make the same case for every $10/mo subscription service in the world, and so we should all be operating at infinite efficiency. After n such iterations, the developer gets 100*(1-0.95^n)% faster. So, after some such $10/month purchases, the developer gets so fast that buying another improvement yields diminishing returns.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dx034 4y agoCertainly for SV salaries. But $19/month per developer in addition to already existing cost can make a difference for regions with lower salaries.
- breckenedge 4y agoI agree. I can see these AI assistants becoming a game changer and eventually a requirement to keeping up, but the costs will be prohibitive for engineers in many regions.
- ch4s3 4y agoPeople with corporate compliance departments.
- Spooky23 4y agoIf you want to make a conversation awkward, ask your account team about the indemnification for the AI’s potential copyright violations.
- WithinReason 4y ago"Notwithstanding any other language in your Agreement, GitHub will defend you against any claim by an unaffiliated third-party that your use of GitHub Copilot misappropriated a trade secret or directly infringes a patent, copyright, trademark, or other intellectual property right of a third party, up to the greater of $500,000.00 USD or the total amount paid to GitHub for the use of GitHub Copilot during the 12 months preceding the claim." From here: https://github.com/customer-terms/github-copilot-product-specific-terms https://github.com/customer-terms/github-copilot-product-spe...
- fire 4y agothe full segment also includes disclaimers on this so it isn't quite as cut and dry: > 4. Defense of Third Party Claims. Notwithstanding any other language in your Agreement, GitHub will defend you against any claim by an unaffiliated third-party that your use of GitHub Copilot misappropriated a trade secret or directly infringes a patent, copyright, trademark, or other intellectual property right of a third party, up to the greater of $500,000.00 USD or the total amount paid to GitHub for the use of GitHub Copilot during the 12 months preceding the claim. GitHub’s defense obligations do not apply if (i) the claim is based on Code that differs from a Suggestion provided by GitHub Copilot, (ii) you fail to follow reasonable software development review practices designed to prevent the intentional or inadvertent use of Code in a way that may violate the intellectual property or other rights of a third party, or (iii) you have not enabled all filtering features available in GitHub Copilot. and as I understand it: • i) means you can't modify copilot suggestions without losing this protection, • ii) isn't actually defined; this might mean they can use it as a crutch to avoid providing protection, • iii) means you aren't protected if you fail to enable settings that are not on by default but in theory allow you to avoid generations that reference "radioactive" licenses like gpl.
- Aeolun 4y agoThe price difference is mostly irrelevant to large corporations. The just need that license management.
- JoshTriplett 4y agoSadly, "simple license management" here just refers to "who in your organization has a license to use this tool", rather than "where did this code come from and what license is it under". This tool remains the equivalent of money laundering for violation of Open Source licenses (or software licenses in general).
- danuker 4y agoIndeed, that is why I don't use it either. Double-checking whether the generated part is a verbatim copy negates the speed advantage. Possible infringements from similarity are even harder to search.
- unxdfa 4y agoYeah we were told not to use it by the lawyers at work and have an official policy against using it. Not having that would open us up for liability if we’re sued as there’s no defence that what we did was clean room if we admitted using it. We’ll hang back until other companies have litigated their way to some legislation around it.
- hashtag-til 4y agoSame here. Told to steer clear of this (in fairness, not only CoPilot, also ChatGPT and stuff), until somebody else pipeclean this in the courts. No matter what is said, there are no license guarantees on the generated code, as you don’t know the exact provenance, so it seems only sensible to be on the safe side.
- aliswe 4y agoThe lawyers on my last job were terrified to know that we store tracking information on website visitors computers that is used to track them by third party corporations.
- hashtag-til 4y agoYes, I can imagine. It’s all fun and games until you get something that sticks on generally available media/press for example Cambridge Analytica sort of stuff.
- aunch 4y agoif you want an actual enterprise solution with in-customer-tenant/on-prem hosting, check out Codeium (https://www.codeium.com/enterprise https://www.codeium.com/enterprise) disclaimer: i'm from the Codeium team. but really, we will even ship you a physical box if that level of data security is important to you
- cloudking 4y agoWhat model do you use? CodeGen?
- aunch 4y agoour own!
- BaculumMeumEst 4y agoyou’re going to need to ship that emacs extension if you want to keep advertising on HN :-)
- aunch 4y agohaha we'll have it out polished in the next week or so :P
- grep_name 4y agoThat plus lisp / clojure on the roadmap is exciting :) I'll definitely give it a try when it comes out. The thing that slows me down is that I actually don't like to get visual feedback while I'm typing. I'm curious if codeium has a good way to compromise there
- BaculumMeumEst 4y agowith copilot.el, i flip it on only when i’m doing something repetitious where i know it’s likely to give me a useful suggestion. then i flip it off. works well for me
- keithnz 4y agoCurrently using codeium after they had an HN post not so long ago. Seems not too bad, though for C# its code generation is pretty poor, though apparently there is supposed to be improvements to the model soon.
- moyix 4y agoMy prediction that they'd offer on-prem hosting of the models (for businesses with IP / secrecy concerns) turns out to be wrong! Seems like a weird choice, but maybe their hands are tied by OpenAI not wanting to lose control over the models?
- IshKebab 4y agoMore likely their hands are tied by not many businesses wanting to pay for a DGX A100 to run the models!
- X-Istence 4y agoWill Github indemnify users against potential copyright lawsuits related to the code it regurgitates?
- jonstewart 4y agoI came here to post exactly this. My team has budgeted for CoPilot, but we’ll only pull the trigger if copyright liability is resolved. I think it’s hilarious Microsoft is doing this, of all companies; it’s like they’ve forgotten that big businesses are run by risk-averse general counsel offices (often for good reason). I can’t even imagine the hilarity that would ensue if I went to my GC right now to ask permission with so much in limbo; it’d be suicide by conference call.
- Kiro 4y agoIt doesn't regurgitate any code unless you bait it really hard. That's not how you use it. The only code it normally regurgitates is your own when it tries to autocomplete your boilerplate.
- rectang 4y agoIs Copilot HIPAA compliant? It sends data to the cloud, so if you paste PHI…
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- lelandfe 4y agoNot an answer to your overall question of compliance, but to the specific point: > Copilot for Business does not retain any telemetry or Code Snippets Data. https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/configuring-github-copilot/configuring-github-copilot-settings-on-githubcom#enabling-or-disabling-telemetry https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/configuring-github-copilo...
- the_duke 4y agoThe key word being "retain". It's probably still sent to their servers.
- ilc 4y agoAnd if that page changes without notifying you? ... Unless they are selling the compliance as a feature, be careful.
- dx034 4y agoAs long as it's part of the agreement, they would need to at least notify you if they're planning to change that.
- ilc 4y agoSource: Ex Hospital IT. I wouldn't risk it. It is too easy to write the wrong prompts and leak PHI. ChatGPT: "Write me a parser for this HL7 message..." Copilot: "Using this example message please write a parser for it..." Yeah... If it was compliant, people would write those in a heartbeat. Unless sold as HIPAA compliant, and the conditions of use for that compliance are known... don't trust it, for SAAS. This is stuff covered in your yearly HIPAA briefing folks.
- commitpizza 4y agoYeah I'll pay for something that is just slightly better/faster than writing it myself but will practically speaking steal my code and give it to others that pay for the same product. /s I'd say no thanks. I think programmers using Copilot is paying for something that'll hurt them in the long run for a tiny benefit in the short run. I don't trust Microsoft, and neither should you.
- yed 4y agoTheir training data comes from repos, not from you using the tool.
- commitpizza 4y agoWell yes, but I use repos just as any other dev does. Most of my own projects I have converted to Gitlab, but still some projects still exist on Github.
- dx034 4y agoHonestly, I don't think the code I write is so special that no one should ever see it. The whole product might be worth protecting, that's why the codebase isn't public. But the individual files/functions are not special in any way. And that'll be the case for 99%+ of all code.
- rwalle 4y agoSo the code suggestion comes from the same data trained for the public version, which could include GPL code or have other issues? I doubt any company would use this in their production code. Internal tools, maybe.
- theRealMe 4y agoMicrosoft itself uses and suggests this internally for production code.
- Maxious 4y agoThis version specifically removes snippets that appear in open source code.
- JoshTriplett 4y agoSo instead of Open Source license violations for which it'd theoretically be possible to provide information to comply with those licenses, it instead only violates proprietary software licenses for which you shouldn't be using the code at all?
- smegsicle 4y agowas it trained on proprietary software?
- wg0 4y agoThere was Kite also that was shutdown. Microsoft can maybe keep it as a vanity product but seriously - I'm curious what kind of teams pr developers are using CoPilot and how much more productive you feel?
- whalesalad 4y agoI love it. I love that it learns my codebase, my style, etc... and truly does feel like a second brain at times. I am using it within JS/Vue and Python and really enjoy it a lot. You can write a simple comment like "upsert the object in the store, and if the item is incomplete recursively call a refresh fn until it is complete" and it will "magically" do the rest - down to understanding where the objects I am referring to are in my store, the attribute used to decide this ('completed_at'), down to the correct syntax for updating the data in a way that plays nice with vue reactivity. It's also a stellar autocompleter in Python-land. I have been using more and more type annotations in my codebases, but even without that, it will usually guess the right attribute or function name. I also dig the way it will automatically write a docstring for a function. It can sometimes be a great debugging method since I can just have it comment an undocumented fn to quickly glean what it is doing. I'll circle back to enhance the docstring usually too so it is less cookie cutter. For writing blog posts it is really neat too, because it will help me write functions to illustrate certain points based on what I am trying to teach in the post. Most of the time I can come up with the most succinct and relevant example, but sometimes I cannot and this tool does a good job helping there. It's not perfect, but the fact that I can type a few words, hit tab, and then correct any mistakes is really a magic experience sometimes.
- fortyseven 4y agoWhen it seems to KNOW where you're going with something and generates a surprise suggestion automatically that's exactly where I'm going with something, it gets real freaky and fun.
- arduinomancer 4y agoI’m curious if enterprise customers would have license concerns about the code produced from using this. Have any big companies set policies on employees using these kind of tools? Do they allow them?
- hashtag-til 4y agoOne data point for you. My company (big UK-based tech company) had an “all employees” sort of e-mail saying the use of Copilot, ChatGPT et al was not allowed for anything work-related or using company equipment due to unclear licensing model of the generated code. I find many of these blanket rules silly, but in this case I find it is sensible to wait before polluting our products with this autogenerated code.
- theRealMe 4y agoFwiw Microsoft itself is betting on and suggesting devs use it for Microsoft production code.
- youssefabdelm 4y agoSo is the new Codex model not available for individuals? That's what they seem to imply in the blog announcement but thats not a difference they highlight on their landing page between the two plans.
- caditinpiscinam 4y agoWhat's the benefit of using copilot over a package manager? Both help you reuse code that's already been written, but using packages gives you updates, explicit dependency tracking, documentation, etc.
- LelouBil 4y agoI don't think you've ever tried copilot. It's amazing at specific things, like being z context aware boilerplate generator or doing the scaffolding of an algorithm from a comment describing it. That's really different than using libraries.
- keithnz 4y agoit's not about reusing code, it's about generating code, ie, autocomplete, except the generator trys to recognize what you are trying to / most probably writing and suggests it. Great for boilerplate type code.
- IceHegel 4y agoHow much better is the new model?