As both a designer and a programmer, I'm (oddly enough) in support of obtvse and the thing behind it. Sure, it looks fairly similar, but the 'magic' like the kudos system and the pretty like CSS features that set the two apart are enough for me to distinguish between the original and the clone.
From the first article I read on dcurtis' site, I noticed the simplicity to the design and really liked it.
When I started to read the article yesterday about his svtble network, I thought to myself, 'sweet, I can finally use this.'
And then I got to the last line, and all that went away. I don't like exclusivity, and while the idea behind the 'every time you see this theme it will feature great bloggers' thing was good, I felt like he could have very easily made a stripped down version of the theme that differed a bit from the 'premium model' for the general public to adopt. Or perhaps not even the ‘general public’ but rather one to just release within Hacker News, a (if I make a generalization) smarter than average community.
Kudos (pardon the reference) to Nate for churning out some good code in a very short amount of time. It’ll be interesting to see where this goes on from here, and how the two will deal with it.
Speaking as a Waterloo resident here, I can't tell you how happy I am to finally see this line made public.