Early CoreOS employee and involved in all of the launch conversations around this...I can confirm there was absolutely no talk of travel plans or catching them at a bad time or anything of the sort. It simply had to get shipped before the conference started so we could talk about it.

No, it was DockerCon EU, December 4-5, 2014 -- and the Docker folks very much believed that it was deliberately timed to their flight several days prior. Unknowable now as that may be, there is no question that Rocket took deliberate aim at Docker -- and timing its announcement to upstage DockerCon is frankly only marginally less petty than timing it to a transoceanic flight. Lest I be seen as defending Docker, Inc. or DockerCon: this is also the only conference that removed a presentation of mine because they didn't like presentations that had more views than their keynotes. So Docker Inc. very much made their own bed, and I understand how Alex and CoreOS got to the point they got to -- but it doesn't mean that they were any more sympathetic in the resulting spat...