Thanks!
This happened two years ago and it took me quite some time to piece together all the information of when it happened. I will see if I can get the original gdb output and add it to the blog post.
Oh my yes, the quiet release of CRI-O by RedHat and Google recently was a pivotal moment. You can run a container orchestration environment in production without anything from Docker the company. You still need it to build and maybe host images but the rest is pluggable.
I'm not sure how you put GitHub in the mix to acquire Docker, they are not a very big company in terms of revenue (currently they talk about a $200m run rate, which is pitiful even compared to RedHat).
But I agree Microsoft is the most likely buyer. They are probably just waiting for the bottom to fall out for Docker and they can snap it up for the right price.