Why are self-taught developers deprived of “free for education” tools?
Github Copilot is free for students, but what about "self-taught" people for which school is too far or too expansive?
Why? Because you can verify that someone is a student, if you try hard enough. And they're trying to get people hooked on their product, and then pay for it.
OTOH, college is expensive for students, why don't self-taught people have to pay tuition fees as well? I think it's obvious that the being self-taught (technically: self-teaching?) and being a student isn't the same thing.
I think because there's no way to differentiate someone who's a learner vs someone who already has lots of experience. They'd basically be giving it away for free to everyone.
Another option would be to license it "free for non-commercial use", although then you have the problem of people using it for commercial use without upgrading.
You don't need any of those "free for education" tools to learn to be a developer. You can bootstrap yourself using the FOSS ecosystem until someone will pay you to be a developer, then you can afford all the paid devtools your heart desires.
Because "free for students" is a marketing ploy to get them using the product in the hope that they will pay for it when they start earning.
There are free tiers of software and services everywhere. Businesses make the calculation that sponsoring university students’ use of their product will create loyal paying customers down the road, and students are both easy to identify via email domain and probably more likely than the general population to make purchasing decisions on software and services.
When does the state of “self-taught” developer end? After some set amount of time? After you earn a set amount of money? How do you verify that? How do you make sure the “self-taught” developer isn’t using the tools for a well-paying job and not for learning? For students, this is limited by the access to their .edu e-mail address, which is often cut after graduation.
GitHub Copilot is a purely optional tool you can live without with (and that I personally don’t find worthy of the $10/month price tag). Many other things are free (VS Code, IntelliJ IDEA Community), and you can be quite productive with that. And speaking of JetBrains tools, you can get a free license if you’re an open-source developer.
Essentially, there's a very broad attempt to brand an actually regressive business bet as progressive. Microsoft (and Github) would love to appear generous, but they aren't.
Most Americans don't go to college and the vast majority don't get 4-year degrees. Those who do are the wealthier, more privileged 3/5 to 4/5 of the country. Some are scraping by on financial aid or scholarships, but as a whole, they'll have more money than other people throughout their careers.
As a result, it's a good marketing investment to give free access to those students capable of putting up 10K+ USD/year in tuition. In the future, a large number of them will be target customers or possibly subsidized via their employers.
Taking bets on self-taught people without those financial resources (present or future) is a great, prosocial thing to do, but it's not necessarily profitable.
because CS students are more likely to pursue software engineering as a career
free for education really is a marketing tool to get the students to use and depend on the product so that when they land a job they can convince their Product Manager to pay for it
this is business, not a charity
Developers don’t need access to paid tooling. At least in the past 15 years or so. You used to need Visual Studio and/or Borland, but these days open source tools are as good as or better.
You don't need Copilot (or other free-to-education stuff) and there is enough that is available (eg VSCode) for you to establish yourself.
They.... aren't.
Awhile back, I wanted to check out Tableau, which offers free licensing to students. I signed up at my local CC (in US) to get a student .edu email, but didn't register for courses.
IIRC, registration was required to get a student ID card, but not the email address.
I learned on only open source tooling and I feel learning to collaborate with the open source community benefited me greatly.
Ignore everyone saying you need special corporate controlled tools to succeed. The best tools are the ones no one can take away from you.
Why not just enroll in a college to get an email and then don't take any courses?
Yeah, I think it would be far better if companies made things free for young people in general rather then just students.
Because college students have to pay tution so they cannot afford those tools.
A good strategy is to just find a friend with a .edu email and bother them