GitHub Sparks Student Backlash by Cutting Premium Copilot Models

GitHub has ignited frustration among students worldwide after announcing the removal of premium AI models from its free Copilot Student plan.

The change, effective immediately, strips access to advanced models such as GPT‑5.4, Claude Opus, and Claude Sonnet, leaving students with only the default “auto mode” option. While the plan remains free, the loss of manual model selection has been met with widespread criticism across developer communities.

GitHub’s Rationale

Martin Woodward, GitHub’s Vice President of Developer Relations, defended the move as a necessary step to ensure the program’s sustainability. “We want to keep Copilot free for students, but offering premium models at scale is not financially viable,” he explained in a statement.

Student Reaction

The timing of the decision has drawn particular ire, coinciding with the start of hackathon season. Many students rely on Copilot’s advanced reasoning capabilities for complex coding projects, and the sudden downgrade has left them scrambling for alternatives. Social media platforms and GitHub forums have been flooded with complaints, with some accusing the company of prioritizing cost-cutting over education.

Before vs. After

Feature	Old Student Plan	New Student Plan
Model Access	GPT‑5.4, Claude Opus, Claude Sonnet	Auto mode only
Cost	Free	Free
Flexibility	Manual model choice	Restricted
Community Sentiment	Positive	Negative

Broader Implications

Critics warn the move could widen the gap between students who can afford premium Copilot subscriptions and those who cannot. With competitors like Codeium and Tabnine offering free tiers, GitHub risks losing ground among the very audience it hopes to cultivate.

What’s Next

Students are calling on GitHub to reinstate at least one premium model in the free tier, while others are already exploring rival platforms. Whether GitHub adjusts its strategy remains to be seen, but the backlash highlights the delicate balance between cost management and community trust in the AI era.

New Relic Unveils Integration with the GitHub Copilot Coding Agent to Accelerate Innovation and Automate Reliability

• Software development solution closes the loop on issue detection and resolution where intelligent agents ensure application health and allow teams to innovate at speed
• Integration reduces time to resolution with end-to-end, proactive monitoring and repair of code issues

New Relic, the Intelligent Observability company, announced an integration of its AI-strengthened technology with the latest agentic capability of GitHub Copilot called coding agent. The powerful integration transforms the traditional, manual approach to change validation and incident response. It gives enterprises a solution for software development that leverages AI to establish a virtuous cycle of continuous improvement. When intelligent agents automatically take steps to ensure application health, enterprises experience increased system reliability and developer productivity.

“Agentic AI is poised to be a transformative technology for enterprise software developers and engineers, who are facing intense pressure to ship more innovations at a faster pace without sacrificing quality and reliability,” said New Relic Chief Product Officer Manav Khurana.“With the innovative integration of New Relic’s intelligent observability technology with GitHub Copilot coding agent, we are closing the loop on ensuring continued application health. Together with our long time partner GitHub, we are providing a new, agentic way for modern software development that uses the power of agentic AI to transform the way enterprises innovate.”

Our integrated solution automates critical end-to-end processes to reduce time, enhance productivity, and increase system reliability

The integration of New Relic AI and GitHub Copilot coding agent has created a cutting-edge development solution that features proactive monitoring, automated issue creation, expedited code repair, and validation and resolution. Within the solution, New Relic monitors code deployments to automatically detect performance issues stemming from changes. Upon identifying a problem, New Relic pinpoints the root cause and automatically creates a comprehensive GitHub issue with all the related, necessary context. Upon inspecting the issue, a developer can decide that the issue context is sufficient and assign it to GitHub Copilot. GitHub Copilot then analyzes the GitHub issue, drafts a fix, and submits a draft pull request for human review. New Relic validates the correction post-merge, completing the cycle.

Key benefits of the integrated solution include:

• Reduced time to resolution - Automates detection and validation processes to address issues faster than ever.
• Improved developer productivity - Empowers engineers to focus on high-impact innovation rather than manual troubleshooting.
• Enhanced system reliability - Quickly resolves performance issues to ensure seamless user experiences.
• Accelerated innovation - Facilitates faster, safer deployment cycles to keep your teams moving forward.

“Millions of organizations rely on GitHub every day for software delivery. Our integrations with key partners like New Relic are instrumental in making our tools that much more scalable, reliable and intelligent,” said Julia Liuson, President, Developer Division, MSFT. "Together with key partners like New Relic we provide developers valuable insights and automation to enhance Agentic DevOps, driving innovation and efficiency across the software lifecycle.”

GitHub Copilot coding agent integration expands New Relic’s partnership with Microsoft and GitHub

New Relic’s agentic AI integrations bring critical observability data and intelligent recommendations across the business and tech ecosystem. The company’s new integration with GitHub Copilot coding agent works alongside the existing GitHub Copilot extension to help engineers get faster feedback on their code and prevent issues from disrupting business.

Availability

The integration is now available through New Relic as a limited preview for eligible accounts that are also Copilot Pro+ or Copilot Enterprise users. Learn more.

GitHub Copilot coding agent is available as a preview to GitHub Copilot Enterprise customers and GitHub Copilot Pro+ users. Learn more.

Resources

• Read the blog post.

About New Relic

The New Relic Intelligent Observability Platform helps businesses eliminate interruptions in digital experiences. New Relic is the only AI-strengthened platform to unify and pair telemetry data to provide clarity over your entire digital estate. We move your problem solving past proactive to predictive by processing the right data at the right time to maximize value and control costs. That’s why businesses around the world—including Adidas Runtastic, American Red Cross, Domino’s, GoTo Group, Ryanair, Topgolf, and William Hill—run on New Relic to drive innovation, improve reliability, and deliver exceptional customer experiences to fuel growth.

Wipro Launches GitHub CoE to Accelerate AI Innovation

Wipro Limited (NYSE: WIT, BSE: 507685, NSE: WIPRO), a leading technology services and consulting company, today announced the launch of its GitHub Center of Excellence (CoE) in Bengaluru. The CoE, as part of Wipro’s ai360 initiative, will serve as a central hub for GitHub-related innovation within Wipro.

The GitHub CoE will use advanced tools to enhance collaboration, learning, and efficiency among development teams. Integrating GitHub tools, including Microsoft M365 and GitHub Copilot, into the software engineering process will enable Wipro teams to drive greater productivity and innovation at scale, providing exponential value to clients.

"The launch of our GitHub CoE highlights our commitment to championing a culture of AI-first mindset with the right skillset and toolset amongst our workforce," said Sanjeev Jain, Chief Operating Officer, Wipro Limited. “We are equipping our developers with the best tools and practices and encouraging a culture of innovation to build future ready AI-powered industry and cross-industry solutions that solve our client’s unique business challenges.”

Kyle Daigle, Chief Operating Officer at GitHub, said, “Wipro has long been a pioneer in innovation, and by rolling out GitHub Copilot at scale, they’re showing the world what true transformation with AI looks like. The GitHub CoE is more than an investment–it’s a blueprint for building with AI at the core. We're proud to build this future together–with the right tools, ingenuity, and a shared belief in what developers can achieve.”

The CoE will have a dedicated team of AI champions, who will receive comprehensive training and support to ensure proficiency in using GitHub and its associated tools. The GitHub CoE will enhance Wipro's teams' skills, enabling efficient delivery of high-quality industry focused solutions. Standardizing development practices will reduce time-to-market and improve deliverable quality, benefiting clients with faster delivery, better collaboration, and stronger solutions.

To equip Wipro associates with GitHub expertise, the CoE will offer training initiatives, including workshops, hackathons, codeathons, and meetups. Additionally, the CoE will create a Community of Practice to promote knowledge exchange and cross-team collaboration through GitHub Champions and subject matter experts.

SAP Announces Its New Open Source Manifesto

SAP recently published its open source manifesto, reinforcing its commitment to open source principles and community engagement. The manifesto aligns with SAP’s established presence as a key contributor to open source. In fact, SAP currently ranks as one of the top ten commercial contributors globally on GitHub in the OSCI.

The manifesto provides guidance to internal developers, as well as customers, partners, and the developer ecosystem. It emphasizes transparency, security, and shared success, aiming to accelerate innovation and collaboration on a significant scale. By embracing open source, SAP not only accelerates its own innovation but also empowers its customers and partners to build on a solid foundation.

SAP actively contributes to several open source projects and foundations. Some notable ones are — Gardener, Kyma, and OpenUI5.

SAP also actively supports and sponsors organizations in the open source community, including the Linux Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and the Apache Software Foundation. If anyone is interested, one can explore more of SAP's open source projects on GitHub.

The manifesto coincides with SAP’s participation in the Open Reference Architecture project under the EU’s IPCEI-CIS initiative, exemplifying SAP’s support for digital sovereignty in cloud infrastructure and services. This project’s development, contributed as open source, showcases SAP’s transparent approach to fostering community-led growth and innovation.

GitHub and Infosys Together Launch CoE in Bengaluru

GitHub has partnered with Infosys to launch a Centre of Excellence (CoE) in Bengaluru. This collaboration is aimed at accelerating the software production process by partnering with Global System Integrators (GSIs). The CoE was inaugurated by GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke, and it represents a significant step in leveraging artificial intelligence to enhance the speed of software development globally.

The partnership also highlights the importance of GitHub Copilot, which is being enabled organization-wide at Infosys to assist developers throughout the software development lifecycle. This move is expected to bring about a globalized step change in the speed of software production.

This initiative is part of a broader trend where Indian developers are becoming increasingly significant contributors to AI projects on GitHub's platform. It's projected that by 2027, India will surpass the United States in terms of the total developer population on GitHub. This partnership between GitHub and Infosys is a testament to the growing influence of Indian developers in the global software development landscape.

The primary goal is to accelerate the software development process by leveraging artificial intelligence and GitHub's tools, including GitHub Copilot. By integrating GitHub Copilot across Infosys organization-wide, developers are expected to experience a significant boost in productivity and efficiency.

How GitHub and @Infosys—the renowned IT consulting firm—work together to help developers across India and the world 🌏🚀 pic.twitter.com/o4QoZrADcM

— GitHub (@github) June 9, 2024

The partnership underscores the growing influence of Indian developers in the global software economy. It's projected that by 2027, India will have the largest developer population on GitHub, surpassing the United States.

The establishment of the CoE is a strategic move to harness the potential of AI in software development and to create a new wave of business value in the global economy. It marks the beginning of what GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke refers to as the "Age of Copilot," signifying a new era for GSIs and software development at large.

GitHub Expands International Operations to India, the Home of its 3rd Largest Developer Community

GitHub Inc., world's leading software development platform, today announced the opening of its subsidiary, GitHub India Private Limited, with the aim to better serve the developer community and GitHub's enterprise customers in the country. India is home to GitHub's third largest community of developers, growing 22 percent over the past year, adding to an already significant base.

Speaking at the NASSCOM Technology and Leadership Forum 2020, Erica Brescia, Chief Operating Officer, GitHub, said, "As the third largest group of active developers on GitHub, Indian developers are truly building the future of software. Over the past year, the number of public repositories in India has grown 75 percent, demonstrating a sharp increase in collaboration across the Indian developer community. In building out a local team in India, our goal is to create stronger relationships with developers and support open source development across developers, maintainers, and enterprises."

GitHub's growth strategy in the country will be spearheaded by Maneesh Sharma, General Manager of GitHub India. Over the next few months, GitHub will build a team across all functions-including community, engineering, sales, support, marketing and services-to enable customers to adopt DevOps best practices at scale and collaborate with over 40 million developers across more than 100 million projects.

Along with support for a thriving open source community in India, GitHub is also working with organizations across industries to help them deliver winning customer experiences using a modern software supply chain and industry best-practices.

A growing number of companies in India, including Swiggy and ArisGlobal are collaborating and building the software that powers their businesses on GitHub Enterprise.

GitHub is also expanding its channel partner program to support GitHub Enterprise customers in running their software development operations effectively, and enable them to achieve their digital transformation ambitions.

India is also home to one of the largest communities of student developers in the world. GitHub is committed to supporting the next generation of developers and helping more student communities come together to learn and build on GitHub. As part of the efforts to empower student developers, GitHub Education is extending its popular GitHub Hackathon Grant program to students in India, supporting student hackathons with up to $1,000 in grants.

About GitHub

GitHub is the developer company. We make it easier for developers to be developers: to work together, to solve challenging problems, to create the world's most important technologies. As the home of the world's largest community of developers and their code, we foster a collaborative community that can come together-as individuals and in teams-to create the future of software and make a difference in the world.

Govt. Censored GitHub, Vimeo & 30 Other Websites in India

Multiple reports are coming in about an extremely unusual bout of Internet censoring in India. Sites like GitHub, Vimeo, DailyMotion, Pastebin etc have been blocked by various ISPs across India on the orders of Modi-led Government.

In this bizarre Internet censorship of Indian govt., DoT (Department of Telecom) has issued a notice to various Internet Service Providers in India to block a total of 32 miscellaneous websites in their network. The notice doesn’t state the reason for this move.

Insane! Govt orders blocking of 32 websites including @internetarchive @vimeo @github @pastebin #censorship #FoEx pic.twitter.com/F75ngSGohJ

— Pranesh Prakash (@pranesh_prakash) December 31, 2014

The above tweet was made public by Pranesh Pakesh, a director at the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore.

In a recent update about blocking these 32 website in India, The head of the Bharatiya Janata political party has claimed that the sites were listed because they content from ISIS.

Gupta added that those sites which cooperate and remove the suspected ISIS content will be unblocked. Nonetheless, looking in from the outside, it certainly seems like the issue could have been handled in a clearer way that didn’t involved issuing blanket censorship blocks.

Most of the websites in blocking provided by govt. like GitHub, Archive.org are as harmless as PMO India's own website and people are still wandering about the reason for this kind of bizarre censorship. Notably, Github is a site that is used by every 2nd software engineer in the world and consider as back-bone of tech-startups of India.

Github, Vimeo, Dailymotion, Archive.org are used by millions across India and have nothing to do with such malpractices and the censorship of these sites is extremely surprising. While Github is ranked 101 in the word among millions of sites worldwide, Vimeo is ranked 119.

Ironically, Indian govt. in November'14 announced that it is planning to create Github like repository of software that can be created collaboratively and most recently appointed Slideshare co-founder Amit Ranjan to head this open source project. And now this move of government is opposing its own ideas.

Lets hope that Modi-led NDA Government realizes their blunder and works on revoking the censorship as soon as possible.

Slideshare Co-Founder Amit Ranjan To Head Government's Open Source Project

Last month we reported that Indian government is planning to create GitHub like repository to collaboratively develop Software and apps. Now, as reports by Economics Times, Amit Ranjan, co-founder of SlideShare - a presentation sharing platform, who sold his start-up to LinkedIn for $118.75 million in a stock-cum-cash deal in 2012, is being approached by government to lead this open source collaborative project.

Github is a platform that provides code hosting services for collaborative software development, source code management services and allows its users to share codes with friends, co-workers and track & assign issue to other teammates.

Amit Ranjan has accepted the offer "in principle", according to one of the several people familiar with the plan. He may start as early as February next year, reporting to the joint secretary (IT) Rajinder Kumar. The role involves leading a soon-to-be-created open source organisation for government projects as its CEO.

Indian government software applications are all set to save millions of dollars by moving away from proprietary system and shifting to open source. This will also result in the boosting of pace at which such programmes are being developed.

As per sources, more technocrats and startup founders may join this open-source project of government in future. This move is expected to collaborate various government initiatives and app developers and can be deployed across the country.

Notably, Amit Ranjan played a pivatol role in startup & entrepreneurship ecosystem in India number of times. He leaded an important role in organizing the first Barcamp (www.barcamp.org) in India/Asia in March'06. BarCamps have since spread to all major Indian cities, and they are regarded as being instrumental in kick-starting grassroots level technology entrepreneurship in India. He was also an organizer of Proto.in (www.proto.in), the biannual event that showcases Indian tech startups.

Govt. Planning To Create A Github-Like Repository To Collaboratively Develop Software

Indian government software applications are all set to save millions of dollars by moving away from proprietary system and shifting to open source. This will also result in the boosting of pace at which such programmes are being developed.

The Indian government is in the midst of developing a policy that will call for the usage of open source software as part of the government’s Digital India initiative. Government's future plans also include developing a Github like repository of software that can be created collaboratively.

"We don't want to make it a question of ideology but wherever possible, we want to make use of open source", said RS Sharma, secretary, department of electronics and Information Technology in a statement to Economic Times.  He further added, "We are also preparing something like SourceForge, where we will open up the source code of all the existing software and crowd source development like on Github".

SourceForge and Github are among the most famous repositories for software codes on the internet that can be revised and shared by many people.

This step by the government will help in boosting e-governance. It will also help in increasing savings as these applications and codes can be used again and again. According to Gartner, the Indian government will spend around $6.4 billion on IT products and services in the year 2014. The advantage of this step taken by the government is that every consulting firm will not have to re-invent the software again and again.  The policy under construction has an aim of speeding up the development process by deploying e-governance projects across various sectors of the government.

"Open source has offered us the best way out of vendor lock-in and unpredictable financial commitments" said Jay Pullur, founder and CEO, Pramati Technologies in a statement to Economic Times.

The repository will work towards avoiding the duplication of solutions and applications to a large extent. For example, if a state wants to adopt a particular application, all it has to do now is go to the repository and customize it.

According to Venkatesh Hariharan, director of Alchemy Business Solutions LLP, "The open code policy will ensure faster deployment of IT projects, speeding up the pace of innovation and reducing failure rate of projects".

 

Govt. Planning To Create A Github-Like Repository To Collaboratively Develop Software

Indian government software applications are all set to save millions of dollars by moving away from proprietary system and shifting to open source. This will also result in the boosting of pace at which such programmes are being developed.

The Indian government is in the midst of developing a policy that will call for the usage of open source software as part of the government’s Digital India initiative. Government's future plans also include developing a Github like repository of software that can be created collaboratively.

"We don't want to make it a question of ideology but wherever possible, we want to make use of open source", said RS Sharma, secretary, department of electronics and Information Technology in a statement to Economic Times.  He further added, "We are also preparing something like SourceForge, where we will open up the source code of all the existing software and crowd source development like on Github".

SourceForge and Github are among the most famous repositories for software codes on the internet that can be revised and shared by many people.

This step by the government will help in boosting e-governance. It will also help in increasing savings as these applications and codes can be used again and again. According to Gartner, the Indian government will spend around $6.4 billion on IT products and services in the year 2014. The advantage of this step taken by the government is that every consulting firm will not have to re-invent the software again and again.  The policy under construction has an aim of speeding up the development process by deploying e-governance projects across various sectors of the government.

"Open source has offered us the best way out of vendor lock-in and unpredictable financial commitments" said Jay Pullur, founder and CEO, Pramati Technologies in a statement to Economic Times.

The repository will work towards avoiding the duplication of solutions and applications to a large extent. For example, if a state wants to adopt a particular application, all it has to do now is go to the repository and customize it.

According to Venkatesh Hariharan, director of Alchemy Business Solutions LLP, "The open code policy will ensure faster deployment of IT projects, speeding up the pace of innovation and reducing failure rate of projects".