> What is Magenta -- in plain english?

Not sure what could be clearer than:

> Magenta is an implementation of Darwin/BSD on top of the Linux kernel.

> And what does binary compatible with iOS 5 mean?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_code_compatibility

That Magenta will run programs compiled for iOS5 unmodified (if they don't use APIs which haven't been reimplemented yet of course)

That's not clear at all.

This guy has basically built an OS from scratch that can run on iPhones and supports iPhone apps without having to recompile them. Currently, only the base layer has been built so graphics/sound etc do not work but the goal is to emulate the entire iPhone OS.

It's based on the linux kernel and the Darwin OS which is the open source core of the Mac OS X.

"This guy has basically built an OS from scratch that can run on iPhones and supports iPhone apps without having to recompile them."

No, that's completely wrong. Go read it, re-read it, and then do a Google search for binary-compatible.

Think of it as WINE project for iOS. He's building the libraries that iOS code depends on just like WINE recreated all the Windows DLLs so that Windows programs could run on Linux/OSX

She.

http://crna.cc/

This is worse, its wrong. And IMO, parent couldn't be clearer.

I think this guy is a gal