[rjh29]

This is not good news. It's actually changed from being free to costing $10/month.

The productivity benefits are worth more than $10/month easily, but somehow I still don't want to pay for it... maybe it's because they're using public domain code to train the model.

[fwip]

Nitpick - they're not (just) using public domain code for training - they're using "publicly available sources, including code in public repositories on GitHub."[0]

This includes a lot of code under copyleft licenses, and possibly even more code under no license at all (implicitly All Rights Reserved). It's not obvious to me that it's ethical (or possibly even legal) to sell a model derived from code not in the public domain.

[0]: https://github.com/features/copilot

[natly]

I wonder if it'd be legal to train your own model with a similar architecture but using input-ouput pairs generated from copilot itself (fair use right?). Sell it for $9/month.

[swah]

Good idea - VSCode doesn't even have a dumb "autocomplete from all buffers" a la Emacs. Of course, LSP is awesome when available, but I'd also use the dumber version every day for a few specific cases...

(I think those cases would be mostly full lines that I know exist on other files in the project - but I don't want to go there, copy and paste if I can avoid it..)

[trothamel]

I disagree that it's not good news.

Copilot clearly cost money to run, so it couldn't be given away forever. By putting a business model on it, it means it's less likely to be rugpulled in the future.

[macspoofing]

>The productivity benefits are worth more than $10/month easily, but somehow I still don't want to pay for it..

Are the productivity benefits worth more than $10/month?

[happyhardcore]

I've easily saved a couple of minutes each day by not having to search some API docs, since Copilot already knows how my variables should fit into the function call. Even if it's just a minute a day, 20 days a month, it works out being worth $10 easily if you're on a typical western software dev salary.

[rjh29]

Uh, yeah. Consider how much programmers are paid per hour. Or how often you look up Stack Overflow or language documentation.

[jpollock]

If a programmer is paid per hour, then this is only worthwhile if it increases their hourly wage. Otherwise, it's just another cost.

Now, if they are paid per job and it makes them more productive... That's different.

[margalabargala]

The majority of programmers in the US are salaried.

[croes]

Isn't the lookup part of the learning?

If you just get the solution the learning gets smaller.

[hutzlibu]

Yes, but I do not want to learn all the internals of every random API, if copilot can help me with avoiding some, I am interested.

[filoleg]

That one would be easy to measure for yourself, because that "worth it" depends on your number of hours worked a month and your compensation.

Let's be on a more conservative end and say that an engineer gets paid $60/hour (i know that most engineers are salaried, so you will need to divide the monthly pay number pre-tax by 160 hours to get that hourly number). If copilot saved more than 10 minutes of your time a month, then yeah, it is worth more than $10/mo.

Do the math on this one yourself, based on how many hours you work in a month on average + your compensation for that time period.

[elil17]

Yes, for sure. I’m entry level but given variable overhead (cost of HR, health insurance, time spent not coding, etc.) it only needs to save me about 5 minutes/month to be break even.

I’ve been trailing the beta for the past few months and plan to recommend a corporate account to our leadership once it becomes available.

[PartiallyTyped]

As a graduate student on a very small salary? absolutely.

The calculus is $10 for a pizza or something for myself, or copilot.

Given that copilot has saved me too many hours to count, i.e. the 1 thing that truly matters, then it's a no-brainer.

[jakear]

You don’t want to pay for it because you like free stuff. So does everyone. But that doesn’t pay the bills.

You don’t need backcraft some moral argument. It’s trivial to see that a large amount of creativity went into developing the system, it’s not just a repackaging of public domain works.

[TAForObvReasons]

The whole controversy was that it was a "repackaging of [licensed] works": https://twitter.com/stefankarpinski/status/14109710611816816...

[xigoi]

Copilot's model is a derivative work of GPL-licensed code, but its source is not available anywhere, which violates the GPL.

[jakear]

Computers don’t violate licenses, people do. If you’re writing MIT code and copilot tells you to include Quake’s square root algorithm and you do so, that’s on you. If Google tells you to include Quake’s square root algorithm and you do so, it’s on you. If stack overflow tells you to do so and you do, that’s on you. In all of those cases it doesn’t matter whether the platform’s software is open source, why should it for copilot?

It’s the poorest of craftsmen who blames their tools. Rise above.

Also, note that simply accessing an online service does not constitute a distribution of software, and thus does not fall under GPL's domain. And "derivative" appears nowhere in the GPL.

[minimaxir]

The beta was implicitly understood to be free temporarily and they never indicated otherwise.

[bladegash]

I don’t mind the cost although I do wish it was a single charge along with my existing GH subscription instead of separate ones. Seems like a missed opportunity to bundle things.

I don’t care about getting a discount, just dislike being billed on two different billing cycles and it seems like a missed opportunity for them to get more devs on their paid tier.

[6gvONxR4sf7o]

If it were trained with public domain code, I’d feel a lot better. But it’s done with code with all sorts of restrictive licenses. The only thing that will change that is new laws (e.g. fair use de-exemptions for ML products)

[Swizec]

> maybe it's because they're using public domain code to train the model

Do you also consider it ethically questionable to look up oublic domain code on for inspiration (like on StackOverflow) while being paid $20,000/month?

Because I certainly do that plenty. I think most of us do

[speedgoose]

I’m relieved it’s only 10$ per month. And my company will get the bill anyway.

[whoomp12342]

because you thinking is free, you paying to have it think is not free. If saving time saved YOU money, then it would be worth it