Does your company ban GitHub Copilot?

Question

Many of my friends are telling me their companies have banned Copilot since it sends sensitive data externally to GitHub, even in their enterprise offering.Have you all heard of which companies have bans, for this or other reasons? Any interesting conversations or internal discussions talking about it?

CM30 · Accepted Answer

I don't think my company even knows Copilot exists, let alone bans it.I certainly haven't seen any message about it, nor evidence of any coworkers using it. But if they did, it'd probably get banned for that same data issue, since they're very worried about folks transferring data from their machines and tend to restrict things like most companies emails being sent to third party addresses, USB devices being used, etc.

decide1000 · Answer

We moved to Gitlab after the acquisition of Github by Microsoft. Copilot is not used here. All devs received a company license for Tabnine.

dglass · Answer

I think the bigger reason it is banned at most companies is because it's nearly impossible to know what kind of license the generated code is available under. Copilot is trained on open source codebases, which carry a number of different licensing agreements to use that code in your own codebase. Companies simply do not want to deal with using software that opens them up to unknown legal risks.

herczegzsolt · Answer

We're a tiny company, but it is basically "banned" for similar reasons.We're concerned more and more about GitHubs behavior ever since the Microsoft acqusition. Due to this, we've agreed not to use any proprietary GitHub solution, including codespaces, actions, as well as copilot. It feels like new GitHub features go towards a data-hoarder, vendor lock-in oriented solution.