What Linux people proposing looks controversial to me.
Why, bits which was written in early '80 and then forgotten because they don't needed anymore now become important? :) A proposal sounds like: lets forget what we're done in last decades and start it over again. Just because of what? Smalltalk image is a living system. Try load and save new version of image. We could say, its the same image. But we all know, that many objects and states within newly saved image will be different to original image. So how you suppose to convince linux-people that given image is a product of creating from text sources? After few iterations (loading/saving and loading new code) it can be nearly impossible to clearly state that.