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Comment by lveillard | Hacker News Reader

Guys you're getting a lot of bad comments for one simple reason. You failed your delivery.

1) You should have managed the expectations of the users in a better way. Tell them it will become a paid feature from the begining, so nobody gets surprised 2) The way everyone unsderstood this today was too aggresive. An infinite warning in visual studio saying "hey, i've stop working, please sign up and pay or uninstall me". Too violent.

A "Hey, we are happy you're using Copilot. We want to inform you that in 2 weeks we will close the beta and we will need you to sign up. But don't worry, it will be free for 60 days"

I'm sure 99% of people here would just be happy to pay those 10usd/month

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It's still free with no payment for existing (beta/technical preview) customers. There was a github bug with some auth token nonsense that was causing problems, but all technical preview users should still be free for 60 days.

I was a technical preview user, and i am getting this error :

GitHub Copilot could not connect to server. Extension activation failed: "User not authorized"

Worse yet, it's not available for the Orgs.

So now each individual developer using it for work suddenly has to either pony up $10/month or figure out how to expense it.

I’m already terrified how many developers have been working on proprietary code bases with copilot, having an extension in their editor upload all their employer’s proprietary code to Microsoft, who then share it with OpenAI - then they’ve taken code OpenAI and Microsoft sent back to them, of unknown authorship, and added it into their code.

And now those devs are going to have to go to their boss and explain all the ways they’ve opened their company up to liability?

This should be hilarious.

Eh. I'd be okay with making all the software in the world open-source. It's only a matter of time before we have computers powerful enough to reverse-engineer everything in a split second anyway.

Matters less what you would be okay with compared to what your corporate counsel would be okay with. But sure, go file that expense claim.

I mean if your code is already hosted on Github, your builds done by github actions, and/or issues managed by github issues, it's not like giving MS that same code back is going to increase "liability" at all.

Setting aside the possibility that not all code is actually hosted on GitHub; If your code’s hosted in a GitHub account owned by your company, under terms vetted by legal… but then you sign up personally for copilot and in that capacity you upload the same code to GitHub under terms and conditions your corporate legal team have no visibility into? You might have a problem.

I think a great rule of thumb is to never take away things that were previously free (maybe more for features of a service/startup).

Copilot is such a marvel though. I think they could have gotten away with it if they did like you say and give more of an advanced warning.

This is exactly why I don't like using MS tools. Relentless use of dark patterns and user-hostile behavior.

I don't want my code editor to try to up-sell me, ever.

Also, the neovim simply stopped working, without any notice what so ever. Wasn't until I checked HN I figured out why it suddenly stopped working.

your comment badly aged

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