What is Letexa supposed to be-come?
You know Wikipedia, Youtube, Myspace, Linux, Apache, etc. There are lots of great projects to contribute content, time and effort to out there!
But one thing is missing: There is no project that extends these open source and Web 2.0 concepts and ideas beyond development, i.e. creating the product or contributing content.
What about marketing, support, sales? On the other hand there are thousands of tiny projects. You can find good content on many many different webpages. Very often they duplicate what someone else has done. Many of these small projects die as quickly as they are created, because the authors soon find out there is little to gain (very little thanks, and lots of demands from obnoxious users, if there are more than a few at all), and lots to loose (time mostly).
Now here comes my idea! I am completely unwilling to contribute a lot of effort for nothing to projects owned by others, or to projects that don't even TRY to make money. To me, money is not "evil" but a way developed by mankind to be able to specialize at all, so that we could get out of those caves and start to specialize.
That's why I cannot understand why making money has not played a role at all so far in any community projects, apart from individual efforts to get a job, build a related business or get funding for the project.
So I started this project out of desperation. There just is no other one to join! So although I think I'm not exactly the first choice I go ahead anyway. I know this will work. Maybe not THIS project, but eventually it will, for the same reasons why Open Source and "Web-2.0" work – and remember, not too long ago all bets were against Linux ever becoming anything more than a system of and for hobbyist programmers, which would never ever be used commercially...
Is the step from creating Linux together to also market and sell something together so great? Is the concept of "a firm" really something so holy that it cannot be improved upon? Is efficiency, resource allocation, and the drive to work in corporations really so great that a collaborative effort could never compete? You do know the highly successful Dilbert cartoons, don't you?