Thanks for the sarcastic comment, I know there's a lot of duplication and NIH in opensource. But I've never seen so much unexplained change anywhere else. Even in the landscape of web browsers where there seems to be a new fork every few weeks, at least people post explanations why they did it.

It's not just open source. How many proprietary virtualization solutions can you think of?

Isn't it good that so many smart people are trying to solve these problems in so many different ways?

Only if the ways are actually different, and the problems are the right problems to be solving.

For example: containerization is a bit like taking a boat with a hole in its hull, and building a new boat to carry the old boat.

When instead, the real problem is that people's applications should be able to run in-place without having to take control of the entire operating system.

> When instead, the real problem is that people's applications should be able to run in-place without having to take control of the entire operating system.

We have plenty of mechanisms - including cgroups - that allows you to achieve that.

What containerisation solutions solve is providing a convenient build and packaging solution that includes a decent level of isolation including preventing state from polluting the surrounding system.

The biggest problem is not lack of isolation mechanisms, but that most developers have no clue they even exist.

Try to get the average Linux developer to tell you what seccomp is, for example, and if they know what it is, try to get them to tell you how to use it [1]. There's plenty of room for innovation here, and plenty of room for more different solutions, but the biggest problem they will need to solve is how to make these mechanisms easy enough to use.

[1] An example here: http://blog.viraptor.info/post/seccomp-sandboxes-and-memcach...

There most likely are explanations. On mailing lists. Where the developers are. Because absolutely none of this is in any way end-user-oriented software. Nobody takes the time to package them up and summarize them like Linux Weekly News does for Linux kernel comings and goings, because there's the distinct possibility that absolutely nobody would care.