Microsoft gives free copies of Office to schools. Why do you think it does that? MS benefits from people being locked into its service and suite. It provides premium subscriptions for additional features.

Hosting code "for free" is part of its business model. It's not a way of "giving back"

> It's not a way of "giving back"

Github Advanced Security costs me $200+/month, but if I make my repository public, I get all of that for free.

Certainly feels like a way of giving back.

Of course it benefits them too, but it doesn’t have to be purely altruistic to be a net positive.

Their point is that they didn't need to own GitHub to build copilot—they could have used the public code regardless.

It's a lot more complicated to crawl code somewhere in the web than to crawl github.

They could even change github so it benefits their code crawling.

That would be a problem if Microsoft didn’t also have their own Bing

Oh, is Bing still a thing? Honest question, haven't heard it mentioned for years. Went from Altavista to Google (I believe, it's a long time ago...) and now to DDG a couple of years ago. Never considered Bing directly although I believe DDG results come or came from Bing.

Yes, Bing still exists. Like you say, that's where a lot of DDG results come from.

Maybe they have a stronger position because they own GitHub. There is at least "Release and Indemnification" section in the terms of service.

Could have. But they didn’t