I'm so used to this being the engine behind, and so unique to, dcurt.is that it actually threw me a little when it wasn't Dustin Curtis's site. I don't know who is/are the developer(s) but my feeling is that it would sit better with a low number of users. Or maybe not, maybe it'll just be like Octopress if it gets opened up.
If it goes in the direction of a nerdier Deck advertising network, with a common look/feel, that sounds great to me. More people I think should do those.
What's so special about it? What's to stop somebody taking design influence from it? There's not a lot to do to make another platform look similar.
Me too; then I realized it is well suited to being a generic blog template. I'd even go so far as to say that I'm used to the idea now.
Looks like it's the platform/network that Dustin Curtis has been using for his own blog (http://dcurt.is) and is finally opening up to other authors, albeit slowly.
There's a link to it in the upper-right corner of dcurt.is that goes here: http://svbtle.com/
Edit: missed where tptacek mentioned the name of it. There's how you find it, though.