Flashback to Digg.com... I hope the people currently in charge of Reddit know how that event played out... it was the single most significant stroke of luck a fledgling Reddit could have possibly hoped for.
The Reddit source is out there, mercifully sans all the redesign code. It would just be a matter of funding + will.
Where
Original: https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit
Improved fork: https://github.com/libertysoft3/saidit