What menage said is true. As it came time to clean up what we were using internally it became a decision of adapting the code and semantics we already have to be cleaner, or starting anew with something like LXC (which does more than we need in some ways and less in others).
We have a lot of really well tested and battle-hardened code and behavior, so we chose to keep that.
lmctfy is designed from the ground up as automation which can be used by humans, and never the other way around.
This is more true than the idea that there's a competitive advantage. We would love to open-source more of our stack (and are working towards it), but it's all very tied to the rest of our cluster environment. Piece by piece.
And yeah, it's been retooled a lot to extract it more cleanly from the surrounding code.