How are multiple Copilot licenses handled?

[matrumz]

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I have an Individual license for GitHub Copilot for my account.

At my company, we use our personal accounts, which are authorized with the company's GitHub Organization, to work in the company's repositories.

How will individuals, who have an Individual license like myself, manage their licenses if we're given Copilot for Business licenses?

[davecheney]

There can only be one copilot licence active per github account. If your employer takes out a Copilot for Business subscription and assigns you a Copilot seat from their account it will refund your CfI subscription.

The details of how or what you're allowed to use your employer provided CfB Copilot seat are a matter for you and your employer to discuss.

[mjmikulski]

@davecheney
The accepted answer is not correct.

I have a corporate copilot, my copilot settings pages says "GitHub Copilot Business is active for your account".

On the same time I have been just charged for private copilot, while I cannot actually use it (there is no way to switch between licenses and the corporate license overrides my private license).

[yshavit]

This answer is in opposition to GitHub's recommendation at this page:

If you aren't required to use a managed user account, GitHub recommends that you use one personal account for all your work on GitHub.com. With a single personal account, you can contribute to a combination of personal, open source, or professional projects using one identity.

As others have noted, both SSO issues and ownership issues make this recommendation very problematic for copilot. Until now, things have worked fine: I just don't authorize my corporate SSO when I log into my account on my personal laptop, and all the non-corporate features just don't get authorized. But with this implementation of Copilot, that means (a) I'm locked out of using Copilot on my personal projects, and (b) I don't know what's going on "under the hood", and whether my personal project is being trained on the corporate account. My personal project happens to be open source, so it's fine -- but if it weren't, there'd be serious issues. And it'd be even worse if I were a consultant!

This is a pretty significant breach of trust, imo.

Is there a publicly-visible ticket to track a feature enhancement to allow multiple licenses? If so, I'd like to follow it, so that I can learn when/if I can start using Copilot on my home laptop.

[twojnarowski]

I've done some very basic tests, and here is what I found: Copilot extension in VS doesn't know about any repos on Github. It only is aware of files in current solution. And the Copilot on github.com, is only aware of currently opened repo.
What I mean is that ask Copilot in VS about anything related to other repos in your organization - it won't know anything.
And second test - open Copilot chat on github.com while you have your personal project open and ask it about your organization's repos - it won't be aware of their existance. Then without closing the chat window, go to one of your organizations repos and ask again the same question, and it will suddenly be aware of it.
So with these crude tests it seems, that there is no security threat about mixing personal/professional stuff. As far as I can see, I could use my enterprise organization Copilot on my private personal projects and no one will ever even know about it. I can also open a solution from a second organization where I have another enterprise Copilot license, and it won't leak any knowledge about Organization A repos to my opened Organization B repo. Because VS copilot doesn't even use github.com and all repos you have access to.

But that's just my opinion based on basic tests. It would be good to get an official answer if that's really the case and one GH account with Copilot can be used for multiple Coplilot licensed organizations without any leaks between them.

[mjmikulski]

and no one will ever even know about it.

I wouldn't be so sure. Corporates usually have some insights about the tool they pay for. So I guess they can check it.

[BenjamenMeyer]

As far as I can see, I could use my enterprise organization Copilot on my private personal projects and no one will ever even know about it.

Orgs usually have tracking. I have a Business license and am thinking of purchasing a business license for my start-up as I've found it beneficial. I know my employer that gave me the license is able to track usage since if we don't use it they'll claw back the license for others to use. However, breaking this could be a contract violation and breach of duty since part of the work agreement for many employers require a clean separation of time and resources for these kinds of things.

Keep in mind, the primary purpose of the license from the business perspective is one of liability here. If you use it outside the business that assigned the license then you may find that the use might not get covered properly if liability became an issue.

[wy8162]

Question: for the same GitHub user name, could I use personal license in my personal computer and use the company license in company computer?

[davecheney]

That is not currently possible. Each GitHub username can have at most one GitHub Copilot subscription.

[flash-me]

@davecheney And don't you think this would be an awesome information that should be mentioned in the documentation? 🫡

cheers
flash ⚡

[tcashel]

@davecheney I ran into this issue as well, My personal CoPilot was canceled and refunded and the Organization License superseded it with no warning or questions asked. Now am stuck not using CoPolot on personal and side projects because my SSO provider cannot disassociate my github account from my organization email, which is not a GitHub problem but a is a situation I would not be in if I could have two licenses.

I would like to pay for a personal copilot license for my personal and side projects, it creates a question of visibility and ownership if anything were to come from a personal project.

I am in a situation where I cannot use Copilot on my personal github account if I join my organization, what happens If I join two organizations that have Copliot licenses(I have not done it but plan to)?

[twojnarowski]

I have mentioned that on VS support: https://developercommunity.visualstudio.com/t/Copilot-running-on-different-accounts-an/10798198
And it would seem that maybe something will change, because it is weird for me that VS doesn't even allow me to quickly disable Copilot, and I just have to open any private file and start writing a comment and already all my private data is going through my Employers tool. And in the same way, the copilot will use knowledge of the repos of my employer and leak them into my private code.

[kojiromike]

My user experience from this was that one day I was routinely using Copilot in immersive mode on github.com. Then I joined an org and suddenly Copilot was disabled. I learned that org had a Copilot Business subscription, but had inadvertently disabled "Copilot in GitHub.com".

I couldn't even use it in relation to private repos and those of other orgs. I left the offending org and re-established my personal Copilot config, but many users won't have that option.

Also, what happens if I'm a member of two orgs that have GitHub Copilot Business or Enterprise and have conflicting configurations? Which one will win? This is definitely not answered by "There can only be one copilot licence active per github account."

[BenjamenMeyer]

Which one will win?

They defined it as the stricter configuration wins out. So for your example, you'd probably end up with the strictest settings of all the orgs you belong to.

[MuradMamedov]

Does anyone know when this will be possible? Almost 2 years have passed

[seanGSISG]

How can an organization upgrade their Business licenses to the Pro+

It's mind blowing that even Enterprise version of Copilot gets fewer premium responses than Pro+

[jeffreywstevens]

I only have one GitHub account as recommended by Microsoft and, at the time, strongly recommended by my employer.
My employer has CoPilot access but severely restricts the features.
I bought a personal CoPilot license and MS of course takes my money.
I did this so that I could experiment personally with features not enabled by my employer. However, I can't set the organizational context on my personal machine for Visual Studio Code or Code Insiders. Will this be fixed anytime soon? This is hugely wrong.

[seanGSISG]

You will need to create 2 accounts

1 for personal use that you pay the subscription with and your work account. It's the only way.

What's infuriating is I am the admin of my businesses organization and it appears to be literally impossible to switch from GitHub Copilot Business/Enterprise to Pro+

You would think the business version or at least the Enterprise version would have the same premium limits....nope!

Who at GitHub came up with this plan? They are about to lose so many enterprise and small business subscriptions if they don't change things up.

Might as well register an azure account and bring your own key into GitHub Copilot, but even then.. Roo/Cline is 10x more feature pack that GitHubs extension

[riosengineer]

I think the point @jeffreywstevens is making, is that it is against the GitHub T&Cs to have multiple accounts (I believe). Therefore, we're stuck.

[nelsonec87]

I have (I guess I had) a free Pro subscription because of open-source-maintainer status. I joined a project supposed to last for only a few weeks, and I was added to their Org. Suddenly I lost access to my Pro features. That's crazy! Obviously I won't be refunded, because it was free. But what will happen when this project ends in a couple of weeks?

[abillingsley]

Curious what the behavior is if you are a member of multiple Enterprises
I work for a software consulting firm, several of our clients are on Github Enterprise and my single Github Username is associated with multiple enterprises what is the behavior in the following scenarios:

• Enterprise A brings a CoPilot license, but Enterprise B does not
• Enterprise A brings a CoPilot license and Enterprise B brings a CoPilot license

Our firm is looking to adopt GitHub Enterprise ourselves and issue CoPilot License to our staff because sometimes our work is done on repositories we manage, and other times work is managed within our client repositories, but our user identities are shared
For our Firm's Enterprise we are going to need to make use of CoPilot exclusion to allow certain repositories within our enterprise to opt out of CoPilot use

Naturally as a consultant the work our team does will shift from client to client on a relatively frequent basis

[BenjamenMeyer]

@abillingsley you get the strictest policy.

If you have a license then you can use it anywhere as long as you can hit the routes. A well setup enterprise though will block the Copilot routes to prevent usage of Copilot if they don't want you using it. However, if they fail to do so then technically any license you have would be usable. That said, I do not advise it as it would introduce a liability to the Enterprise that the Enterprise can only resolve by purchasing a license for indemnification of anything that Copilot did that it shouldn't have.

For a software consulting firm - obviously contact a lawyer for actual legal advise - but the best option would likely be to provide the license to your consultants and write it into the contract for your clients so that you are all protected; if a client wants you on their network and blocks it then you can't use it; but if they didn't want it and failed to block it then you protect the firm and your contractors. Again, consult a lawyer for actual legal advise and how to do this.