This is incorrect.

Docker in its earlier incarnations was based on openvz, which predates lxc. The lxc project was initially a kernel development project: a collection of kernel patches to add container support. The userland tool was just a companion. When it became apparent that these patches would "win" the race to be upstreamed even though openvz was much more mature, we switched our tooling to lxc. The patches matured over time, but the userland tool (what we now know as "lxc") was finicky.

The original open-source release of Docker wrapped lxc for low-level container operations. But it was just too unreliable and we swapped it out for an in-house Go implementation called "libcontainer".

As for "commercializing": Docker was famously bad at commercializing anything, we open sourced so much (maybe too much) and still people complained that we were not open enough.

The LXC way of getting an up per container is pretty great - I’m basic bitch with this sort of thing so I assume it’s less of an issue for the experts but really enjoyed the IP per container when I hit it.

I’m a huge fan of nspawn. Always wanted to use VMs instead of Docker and nspawn feels like a natural choice.