You’re too late! Monday was the last day to score your own free CD of your GitHub repository, which the Microsoft-owned subsidiary offered to mail to the first 1,000 people who asked. 

But as of noon eastern time, that offer has been withdrawn (if it was ever genuine) after sparking confusion and ridicule.

Last Thursday, GitHub issued a short notice on X extending an offer:  

In light of recent developments in physical media, GitHub is proud to announce that you can now obtain your public repo on CD-ROM.

Keep it. Lend it to friends. Pass it on to your children.

Your code is physically yours, forever. Until you lose it, let's be real.

Order yours today.

What “recent developments” the company referred to is anyone’s guess, though it implied that it came about as some sort of public pressure: “We heard you. And we agree,” the X missive began. (“No one fucking asked for this” one commenter retorted). 

Many media outlets, including Tom’s Hardware and Destructoid, speculated that GitHub’s offer was actually a jab at Sony for discontinuing optical media for its PlayStation consoles in 2028.

GitHub was not alone in its mockery of the Sony announcement. Nintendo and other companies responded. Even the Spanish arm of the KFC fast food chain took aim at Sony on social media, mockingly announcing it would no longer offer its “physical format” (“ÚLTIMA HORA: KFC dejará de ofrecer su formato físico a partir de hoy.”).

But the GitHub joke came with an action item, and that’s where the trouble started.  

The original GitHub message included a link to a Microsoft form (gh.io/cd) where one could provide details as to where to send their CD.

The form stated that it would accept applications for the first 1,000 people who applied, until July 6. It asked for a GitHub user name, repo URL, and the requester’s shipping address and phone number.

The form was taken offline as of press time, though the tweet (or X post) remains intact. 

GitHub did not immediately respond to requests for comment. 

Pity the poor intern

If the offer is indeed a troll on the part of GitHub and Microsoft, it is indeed an odd one, and not just because fulfilling the requests would involve a lot of work on the part of GitHub’s mail room and the troll-master’s minions who would presumably be responsible for burning all those CDs. Does anyone at GitHub even have a CD burner? That was one of the questions we wanted to ask Github.

And GitHub/Microsoft best be careful about throwing disks around. However controversial its decision, Sony does have the velocity of technology development behind its decision. 

“This transition will enable us to align more closely with how most of our community prefers to access and play games today,” read a Sony statement.  

Today, about 85% of all games sold are downloads, Sony has reported in its financials. 

Shooting fish in a barrel

The original announcement quickly got ratioed, as the kids are wont to say, by mockery of GitHub’s many recent outages.  

“They have to ship you CDs because the website is barely up,” one commenter wrote. 

“Why we need github when you can run remote repo on CD” another piped in.

Also, the CD format is an oddly archaic format to base a protest from, especially coming from a parent company that got its start distributing OSes by floppy discs.

Moreover, there are plenty of open source projects whose repos could easily overfill the 700 MB limit of a burnable CD.  

One, for instance, is Google Chrome repo, which open source developer Dmitriy Kovalenko said he requested a copy of. “Let’s see how they ship 66G repo on a CD,” he wrote on X.

Far more problematic is that GitHub also faces the very real danger that users – those still with disc readers – would actually find such an artifact genuinely useful. 

“Stop taunting people for desiring physical media that they control” someone else commented. ®