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OpenVZ is very unfairly left out of this history. It gave Linux Solaris-style containers in the mid-2000s, is still used in production in many ISPs and private clouds, and is still security-wise superior to cgroups, LXC, and Docker. Its security is good enough for public VPS vendor multi-tenancy.

For whatever reason OpenVZ was never merged and we got cgroups instead. If things had gone differently we'd already have safe multi-tenant container hosting.

Here's some history: http://openvz.livejournal.com/49158.html

For years OpenVZ/Virtuozzo people were happy to keep it as a separate patchset. Their business model seems to have been based on their custom software stack, of which OpenVZ was a part. Then suddenly the rest of the world started using cgroups on Linux.

Ahh... that's too bad. Their (and our) loss.

Was it a NIH thing or licensing?

No idea, but it was and in some ways still is superior.

the team from Waffle.io made a similar choice with Docker for on-prem http://blog.waffle.io/how-to-build-for-github-enterprise/

"...a service that is Linux-distribution agnostic." I lol'd; then I upvoted.

The Evolution of Docker