My experience with Oknotizie.alice.it (first Italian reddit-alike site with 2 Millions unique users for month) is that clones suck. Since we started more than one year ago we saw an incredible number of clones using pligg, php-dug, and so on, but nobody was able to take even the 5% of the italian market from us, because it's a matter of quality, user experience, strong algorithms to prevent spam (usually the algorithms implemented in the clones are very trivial and easy to break).
Also clones are always not uptodate with features, for example Oknotizie exactly like reddit entered the beta testing stage of "subreddits" (called "groups" on our system) one week ago, probably today we will open the feature to the public. Clones will implement this things later I guess.
It's a bad idea to start from already written code if you are starting a startup.
It's really great to be able to read the source code of a digg clone, to see how the rating algorithms work, instead of reverse engineering it yourself.
Normally I prefer writing my own ruby or java code, than modify some elses php hacks^^H^H^H^H^code.
Wow, they are actually charging money for this stuff too.
While there is a good point to be said of using pre-made scripts (if you think you can make it better), I believe most good programmers at startups actually want to code their own stuff so the idea of script clones will really turn them off.
If all you know how to do is play with templates then you're not a very good programmer. Creating scripts from scratch takes real skill.
Also clones are always not uptodate with features, for example Oknotizie exactly like reddit entered the beta testing stage of "subreddits" (called "groups" on our system) one week ago, probably today we will open the feature to the public. Clones will implement this things later I guess.
It's a bad idea to start from already written code if you are starting a startup.