Thomas Dohmke, the former CEO of Microsoft-owned GitHub, just opened the waitlist for Entire—a startup aiming to upend how developers host and share code. On July 8, 2026, the company began accepting sign-ups for its distributed Git network, which automatically mirrors GitHub repositories across a globally replicated infrastructure. The move signals a direct challenge to centralized platforms at a time when software supply chain resilience has never mattered more.
The Distributed Git Network: How It Works
Entire’s core product is a peer-to-peer overlay for Git. Instead of pushing code to a single origin server—think GitHub or GitLab—developers commit changes to a network of interconnected nodes. Each node holds a full replica of every repository it participates in, much like a blockchain ledger but without the consensus overhead. Entire’s proprietary protocol ensures that every push propagates across all registered nodes within seconds, and the network automatically heals if a node goes offline.
The initial launch is invitation-only, accessed via a waitlist on Entire’s website. The company has not disclosed pricing, but early materials position the service as a freemium model: free for open-source projects with public mirrors, and paid tiers for private enterprise deployments. The technical stack builds on top of existing Git primitives, meaning developers can keep using their familiar git CLI, IDEs, and CI pipelines without modification. Entire acts as an additional remote, working alongside GitHub rather than requiring a migration.
Dohmke’s vision, as described in a blog post announcing the waitlist, is to “make code as resilient as the internet itself.” By spreading copies across independent data centers, Entire eliminates single points of failure. The network currently spans 14 regions—including US East, US West, EU Central, and Asia Pacific—with plans to double that by year-end.
What It Means for Windows Developers and Power Users
For the everyday Windows user who only downloads software, the change is invisible—for now. But for the 3.2 million developers on Windows who use Git daily (per Stack Overflow’s 2026 survey), Entire’s arrival introduces both immediate opportunities and new decisions.
Home users and hobbyists: If you maintain a side project on GitHub, you can join the waitlist to mirror your repository onto Entire. The benefit is redundancy. A GitHub outage or DMCA takedown won’t block your collaborators from pushing and pulling code. Entire also supports verifiable timestamps and cryptographic signing out of the box, making it easier to prove code provenance without configuring external tools. You’ll still push to GitHub as your primary—Entire runs in parallel, so there’s no workflow disruption.
Power users and system administrators: For those managing internal infrastructure on Windows Server or Linux VMs, Entire’s distributed model can simplify disaster recovery. You can designate a local Windows machine or a cheap VPS as a peer node, holding a full copy of critical repositories. If your company’s GitHub Enterprise instance goes down, development can continue against the local mirror. Entire’s Windows agent—currently in preview via the waitlist—installs as a background service, consumes minimal resources, and syncs automatically. Microsoft’s own documentation has long advised using Git bundle for DR; Entire makes that real-time and collaborative.
Enterprise developers: Large organizations often run self-hosted GitHub or Bitbucket behind firewalls. Entire can federate these silos. Each office runs a node, and code synchronizes across all locations. The network handles merge conflicts using a CRDT-like approach, though final resolution still falls to humans. Early adopters cited in Entire’s materials include a major automaker that linked engineering teams across three continents without needing a VPN connection.
The Road to Distributed Git
The centralization of software development isn’t ancient history. Before GitHub’s 2008 launch, most open-source projects used mailing lists and self-hosted servers. GitHub made collaboration effortless, but it also made developers dependent on a single company. That dependency deepened after Microsoft’s 2018 acquisition. Despite GitHub’s longevity and engineering rigor, the reality is that it can go down—a five-hour outage in 2025 reminded everyone of that.
Dohmke, who led GitHub from 2021 to 2025 under Microsoft, witnessed these events firsthand. He championed Git’s inherent distributed nature inside the company, pushing for features like repository caching and cross-region failover. But he ultimately concluded that a platform owned by a single entity could never fully realize a decentralized internet for code. He left Microsoft in late 2025, and founding Entire shortly thereafter.
The startup has raised $74 million across two rounds, according to Crunchbase, with backing from former colleagues and infrastructure-focused venture firms. Its team includes several ex-GitHub engineers who worked on git’s core protocol. Entire isn’t the first to attempt distributed Git services—Radicle and Secure Scuttlebutt predate it—but it is the first to target seamless interoperability with GitHub at enterprise scale.
The timing aligns with rising regulatory pressure. The EU’s Cyber Resilience Act, effective 2027, will require critical software components to have verifiable, tamper-proof sources. Entire’s ledger of signed commits and automatic mirroring could help companies demonstrate compliance without overhauling their CI pipelines.
What You Should Do Now
If you’re interested in early access, head to Entire’s website and sign up for the waitlist. The form asks for your GitHub username, primary use case (open-source, enterprise, or personal), and geographic region. The company says it will begin sending invitations “within weeks,” with priority given to open-source maintainers and large teams. There’s no commitment required.
Once you get an invite, you’ll receive a personal peer node endpoint. For local testing, you can run the Windows agent on your dev machine. The agent is a 12 MB MSI installer that registers a system service. After you authenticate with your GitHub token, it begins mirroring all repositories you’ve starred or contributed to. You can then add the Entire remote via git remote add entire <your-node-url>. Pushes go to both GitHub and Entire by default.
Be aware that Entire is beta software. The company warns that the network may experience intermittent sync delays and that data loss is possible. Don’t rely on it as your only backup until the general availability release, tentatively scheduled for early 2027. Also, check your organization’s compliance policies. While Entire encrypts data in transit and at rest, the distributed nature means code can be stored in multiple jurisdictions, which may conflict with data sovereignty rules.
For Windows administrators, you can deploy the agent across a fleet using Group Policy or Microsoft Intune. Entire provides ADMX templates that let you control which repositories are mirrored and set bandwidth limits. The agent reports health metrics to Windows Admin Center, so you can monitor sync status centrally.
The Wider Developer Ecosystem Impact
GitHub isn’t standing still. At Build 2026, Microsoft announced “GitHub Resiliency Zones” that replicate repositories across Azure regions with a one-click setup—a feature clearly influenced by Dohmke’s new venture. GitLab, too, has accelerated its Geo replication features. Competition is heating up, which ultimately benefits developers.
Entire’s success will hinge on adoption. The waitlist gives the team a controlled beta to iron out scale issues. But the long-term question is whether developers are willing to manage yet another remote, even if it’s automatic. Dohmke’s answer is that Entire will eventually become invisible—an infrastructural layer that all Git hosting services plug into, turning each one into a distributed mesh.
For Windows users, the development experience on the platform continues to improve. Windows Terminal now ships with native Git integration, and WSL 3 allows Linux-based Git performance that rivals macOS. Entire’s Windows-friendly approach—with MSI installers, PowerShell cmdlets, and Windows Admin Center integration—signals that the company sees Windows as a first-class development environment. That’s a significant departure from the Mac-centricity of many earlier developer tools.
What to Watch Next
The waitlist opening is just the first step. Entire has pledged to publish a detailed architecture white paper by the end of August 2026, along with performance benchmarks. It will also open-source the network client under an MIT license. Microsoft’s response will be worth monitoring; if GitHub introduces integrated mirroring to Entire’s network, it could validate the approach and accelerate adoption. Conversely, if GitHub locks down its API or throttles mirroring, developers could be caught in a proxy war.
For now, the distributed Git revolution remains in preview. But the message from Entire is clear: the era of trusting a single company to store the world’s code may be coming to an end.