What is TOVIO?

TOVIO is a version control system built to replace Git. It keeps what Git got right — content addressing, distributed history, offline work — and changes five things Git cannot do.

The five differences

• Per-file permissions, enforced by cryptography. A protected path is encrypted at the moment it is snapshotted, under a policy declared inside the repository. Someone without the key holds ciphertext, not a permission error. There is no server to ask nicely, so the rule still holds on a clone sitting on somebody else's disk.
• AI agents are first-class and constrained. An agent works under a capability token scoped to paths, operations, and time. The scope is enforced before anything is sealed — an out-of-scope write fails rather than being noticed afterwards — and every commit it makes carries provenance: which agent, under which token, for which task, through which delegation chain.
• Change identity survives history rewriting. A change keeps a stable chg: id through rebase, amend, cherry-pick, split, and absorb. In Git, rewriting history mints new commit hashes and orphans everything attached to the old ones; in TOVIO a review, a comment, or a dependency stays attached.
• Conflicts are objects. A conflict is recorded in the repository rather than smeared into your working files. No marker lines land in your tree, your build still runs, and tovio conflicts exits 0 — a conflict is data, not a failure.
• Binary files work without add-ons. Content-defined chunking (FastCDC) handles large binaries directly, and BLAKE3 addresses every object. There is no LFS to install and no pointer files to explain.

What it is not

It is not a Git wrapper, and it is not a hosted service you sign up for. TOVIO runs on your machine. To share work, one machine serves the repository over TLS with tovio serve and the others clone and sync from it. A team that also wants proposals, review, checks, locks, events, and a signed audit chain runs a Forge instead.

Licensing, briefly

The engine, the CLI, the specification and conformance corpus, the Node SDK, the MCP server, the desktop app, and the editor integrations are Apache-2.0. Commercial are the Forge (the collaboration server, in both its self-hosted and TOVIO-operated forms), the web dashboard, and the enterprise and cloud components — enterprise cryptography and the threshold Key Authority, the directory and identity-provider connectors, and the hosted control plane. That last group lives in its own separated part of the source tree, which the open part is structurally forbidden to depend on. The free server is tovio serve inside the Apache-2.0 CLI — a genuine bidirectional TLS server that enforces the protected-lane and write-policy gates. What it does not carry is the collaboration platform, and that boundary is documented rather than hidden.

Where to go from here

• Vocabulary first: The seven concepts you actually need.
• Coming from Git: TOVIO vs Git in one page.
• Deciding whether to adopt it: Is TOVIO ready for my team yet? — it is deliberately blunt.