After 6 months you'd have a rushed prototype. What good is that? Building a Lisp operating system may be interesting from an academic point of view, but it fills no need. A waste of 6 months.

In 6 months you can only do something mundane. For instance, adapt SBCL so it flawlessly interacts with CPAN and remove all the legacy lisp stuff. Then you'd have a clean lisp with a great library environment. People could actually -use- it. Still not a great business idea, but it has a small chance to rock the world. Especially since Ruby and Python are slowly becoming popular the ahead-of-the-curve guys are getting edgy. They want to move on to the next big language, and they want that language to be Lisp.

A "rushed prototype" might still be a good start. What was the business need filled by the Linux kernel when it was at 6 months?

Your mundane suggestion has quite a bit of merit. However the Lisp OS would rock the world in a much bigger way. What I described would actually be capable of running Linux apps, but would also open the door to advanced kernel hacking to ordinary application programmers. It would be capable of competing against a commercial version of Singularity. It would further enable innovation with regards to security and programming models. It would be in a position to become the Linux/BSD of the next generation of F/OSS operating systems.

It would hardly be a waste.

Serious question for the Lisp wizards in the audience: Hasn't this been done? What aspect of this did the Lisp machines lack? (Disregarding the obvious fact that the specific languages "Ruby" and "Python" hadn't been invented yet, back in the Lisp machine's day?)

However, we are transitioning from workstations to server-based applications in the cloud. Lisp machines would have some significant advantages there.

There's already a (partial) Python-in-Lisp project: http://common-lisp.net/project/clpython/

They don't seem to have huge amounts of time and money to invest in a complex project I'm not quite sure how to monetize.