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Bad form responding to own post. I clicked post before putting in the part about PAST/FreePastry I recall something similar technically six years ago for peer to peer storage. No direct experience with FreePastry or Storj. I'm trying to understand the technical differences here.
PAST white paper
http://research.microsoft.com/...
I'm guessing they licensed it out here?
https://trac.freepastry.org/wi...

As others have pointed out, IP Multicast is tough to deploy, fragile, and not particularly scalable. What you really want is so-called Application-Level Multicast: distributed construction of p2p multicast trees (or other similar structures) among end hosts, without help from routers. See: Scribe/SplitStream, End System Multicast (ESM), Overcast, etc.

As others have pointed out, IP Multicast is tough to deploy, fragile, and not particularly scalable. What you really want is so-called Application-Level Multicast: distributed construction of p2p multicast trees (or other similar structures) among end hosts, without help from routers. See: Scribe/SplitStream, End System Multicast (ESM), Overcast, etc.

So, I work on Pastry. There are two branches of Pastry: MSPastry (developed by Microsoft Research) and FreePastry (developed initially by Rice, open source, now developed primarily at The Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (where I work)). They were started at roughly the same time, while Prof. Peter Druschel (formerly of Rice, now at MPI-SWS) was on sabbatical at MSR.

Microsoft didn't co-opt anything, and in fact allowed and encouraged the open source Java version initially. These days I understand the MSPastry isn't actively developed, but FreePastry lives on. FeedTree uses FreePastry, as does ePOST, and a variety of other projects.

Sorry not to mention it in the first place, but I did study directly under Dr. Wallach (a security/distributed systems researcher at Rice) who is a project member listed at freepastry.org. I did not build these things in question, but I have studied their properties and used them (Pastry, specifically) to build other things.

I have worked under Dr. Wong for a couple of years at Rice, working on Pastry-related and other distributed systems. No, those people are not me, but I have worked with them, and am familiar with their research and the relevant systems, and am happy to finally see these advances make their way into the mainstream.

Why is everyone so ready to bash me for praising them? I thought freely identifying myself as being (very loosely) related to the projects and disclosing my bias was something honest people do.

I have plenty of my own projects that I hope will be worthy of praise some day, and others that have already been praised. Getting some by proximity isn't my goal here. My real goal, actually, was to talk up Rice :)

SQUIRREL is a fully decentralized, peer-to-peer cooperative web cache, based on the idea of enabling web browsers on desktop machines to share their local caches.

Actually, my advisor, Peter Druschel, developed Pastry with Ant Rowstron (of Microsoft Research). Since then, a number of bright researchers from Rice and elsewhere have contributed to the project; their names and publications are listed on the official Pastry website.

There are a number of implementations of the Pastry design; FeedTree uses the Java-based FreePastry package, which is under active development by Rice and the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems and is available under a BSD-like license. Other interpretations include MS Pastry (C#, used in COMP 410 as you point out) and the Bamboo DHT (Java, inspired by Pastry and developed at UC Berkeley).

Actually, my advisor, Peter Druschel, developed Pastry with Ant Rowstron (of Microsoft Research). Since then, a number of bright researchers from Rice and elsewhere have contributed to the project; their names and publications are listed on the official Pastry website.

There are a number of implementations of the Pastry design; FeedTree uses the Java-based FreePastry package, which is under active development by Rice and the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems and is available under a BSD-like license. Other interpretations include MS Pastry (C#, used in COMP 410 as you point out) and the Bamboo DHT (Java, inspired by Pastry and developed at UC Berkeley).

As a Rice Computer Science student I would like to point out that Pastry actually originated at Rice, under Dan Sandler. The first framework was in Java. You can see from his web page that he's responsible for FeedTree, too.

Microsoft Research became interested in the product and ported it to C#, effectively turning it into the form it is now. Many classes at Rice have now "backported" it, I guess you could say, and it's used for many of our classes that involve distributed networks, such as the current COMP 410 class which has previously turned out distributed file and process system codename Voltron.

Here's a link to the paper co-authored by Sandler and others at Rice.