Microsoft-owned GitHub announced on Wednesday a free version of its popular Copilot code completion/AI pair programming tool, which will also now ship by default with Microsoft’s popular VS Code editor. Until now, most developers had to pay a monthly fee, starting at $10 per month, with only verified students, teachers, and open source maintainers getting free access.
GitHub also announced that it now has 150 million developers on its platform, up from 100 million in early 2023.
“My first project [at GitHub] in 2018 was free private repositories, which we launched very early in 2019,” GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke told me in an exclusive interview ahead of Wednesday’s announcement. “Then we had kind of a v2 with free private organizations in 2020. We have free [GitHub] Actions entitlements. I think at my first Universe [conference] as CEO, we announced free Codespaces. And so it felt natural, at some point, to get to the point where we also have a completely free Copilot, not just one that is for students and open source maintainers.”
‘free’
So is that ‘sell my data’ free? Or ‘get you hooked on the product and then add a subscription a year later’ free?
Bastards.
Both. And there is no guarantee they are not selling your data even if you pay.
uBlock Origin Filters to get rid of Copilot bloat on Github
uBlock Origin => Open the Dashboard => My Filters => Add:
github.com##.copilotPreview__container
github.com##.AppHeader-CopilotChat
github.com##li.ActionListItem:has-text(Copilot)
github.com##a[href*="/settings/copilot"]
github.com##a[href*="/features/copilot"]
github.com##a[href*="/resources/articles/ai"]
github.com###copilot_free_global
github.com###blob-view-header-copilot-icon
Also disable + block everything under: https://github.com/settings/copilot
Time to start using VSCodium then, I want no cloud AI in my development setup.
But it has ai chats baked in as well, or is there a way to disable it? Haven’t looked properly yet.
If would be amazing to stop using the word free when we are talking about companies like Microsoft and Google
They’re gonna have to pay me to waste my time with this trash
Does the EFF call it Free?
