Neither is FAT was/is innovative. This doesn't nullify patent or first adopter arguments. In context of Linux container is good example of Microsoft trying to piggyback on Linux.
Yeah, the thing with the FAT patent is ugly and is going to leave a black mark on MS for a long time. But is your argument that MS joined the Linux foundation so that nobody would sue them for using containers? I highly doubt that is the case since nobody has expressed any interest in suing over patents. In any case it would probably be IBM or Sun or one of those old-school commercial UNIX companies that have patents on this stuff. Whats more likely the case that MS wants to make sure that people who don't want to use Windows would still use their Azure services. This is mostly a token amount to show that they're serious about supporting Linux based workloads.
