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I don't think that's a good read on the situation. I think a better analysis is that there is no money being what amounts to a facade on top of an operating system/kernel capability. All the real novelty and challenge to containers is in the OS itself. Everything else is more or less ease of use, which is important but relatively easy to replicate. In the span of 5 years or so, Docker went from being critical glue code to cruft.

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That facade enabled millions to have easy access to that particular kernel feature. BSD jail's have been around for decades without mass adoption.

I think the GP's point is that alternatives can easily spring up when the main feature-set/value is in the kernel rather than the glue code.

BSD jails weren't widely adopted because the BSDs themselves weren't widely adopted by the time the industry got to the point where something like Docker was increasingly seen as necessary. I remember being involved in one project that had to decide this exact question in the very early days of Docker - jails were much more stable back then, but customers wanted Linux containers, not "sufficiently Linux-like".

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