Only three (of many) Unix-like families have containers, and while Linux was last "to the punch" the others only had them for a few years more. FreeBSD Jails were ready by 2000[1], Solaris Zones were released in 2005[2], and cgroups were merged in 2007. But OpenVZ's containers technology had already existed since 2005, and I would argue that most of the modern Linux "container" infrastructure came from their experiences (plus that of Google). To be fair, cgroups were nowhere near good enough and it took another few years for namespaces to become good enough to be considered "containers".

But my general point is that people talk about Linux as being out-of-touch when it comes to the history of containers, but if you look at the timeline that simply isn't true.

[1]: http://phk.freebsd.dk/pubs/sane2000-jail.pdf [2]: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.93....