[breckenedge]

An 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/. Still seems like a very steep increase over the base. And I cannot believe there are only 400ish companies using copilot.

[Aeolun]

The price difference is mostly irrelevant to large corporations. The just need that license management.

[tccole]

9 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]

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.

[aleph_minus_one]

> 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.

[dx034]

Certainly for SV salaries. But $19/month per developer in addition to already existing cost can make a difference for regions with lower salaries.

[breckenedge]

I 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.

[Spooky23]

If you want to make a conversation awkward, ask your account team about the indemnification for the AI’s potential copyright violations.

[WithinReason]

"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-spe...

[fire]

the 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.

[dx034]

Still sounds pretty friendly to me. Obviously once you modify the code Github cannot be liable anymore for the lines edited. Otherwise you could push all kinds of infringement on them just because Copilot was active.

Reasonable development practices certainly don't include scanning every line for copyright, but should catch the most obvious cases.

Overall I'm surprised they're willing to bet $500k per client on the legality of Copilot.

[Spooky23]

The word “patent” is missing and $500k is nothing. And how are you going to prove that you didn’t modify whatever was suggested by the AI?

[WithinReason]

1. The word "patent" is there

2. By rerunning the network for the same input

[ch4s3]

People with corporate compliance departments.

[das_keyboard]

I 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.