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How Best To Launch Free Software?
Chip asks: "The small business for which I work is preparing to release a free software title for Windows and hopefully Mac and Linux as well. This software is something I believe many people around the world will find useful without ever having to pay a dime. Does anyone have experience with releasing free software on a small budget? Any advice would be very helpful. We have a few months to prepare for beta launch and I am nervous about getting the word out, crashing our servers, etc..."
He doesn't actually say open source software, only free.
Well, you could start creating a buzz by talking about your software here. And when it comes to launch time, you could crash test your servers by submitting an announcement to slashdot :-)
And when you do launch it, get all the software download sites to mirror it (tucows, cnet, etc), and submit it to special interest magazines and sites for review.
The most important thing to do is get word out. Word of mouth is by far your best bet and of course, it is best received through the words of satisfied users. Don't be too surprised if you don't have a huge "opening day." That's not important. What's important is do you grow AFTER that? Longevity is not guaranteed by a quick open. Get yourself in search engines. Get yourself on websites that relate. If you're going to be competing with another product, and they have a website with some sort of community forum, slip yourself a plug there. (Sure, it will probably be deleted, but the damage may well have been done before it is!)
If your product is a unique entity--that is, something new or relatively new that people haven't seen before--you may just be able to stand on your own.
If not, which is more likely the case (to some degree and in some regard), you need to offer something that others don't offer. Maybe it's ease of use, maybe it's a new feature. If you don't offer any of that, well, hopefully it's on par with the competition. The price is certainly right.
Good luck.
Sorry to be a pedantic bitch, but the idea of software that didn't cost money existed long before RMS sucked his idea of 'free' out of his bong.
If you're going to insist on chastizing anyone who dares misuse the term "Free software", perhaps you should limit yourself to going after people who use the capitalized form of Free, which signifies a proper noun and would actually mean GPLed software.
Only on slashdot can a posting be rated "Score -1, Insightful".
Most open source projects goes live without _any_ budget. All that it takes is time (which is a cost for companies, but not for voluntary workers).
It is a cost for voluntary workers. Open source is paid for by people who have day jobs that subsidize their hobby of writing code - the money has to come from somewhere. If the effort of supporting a release has a material impact on productivity of the day job, then it has a cost, since without that subsidy, the developer can't pay rent, bills, buy groceries, upgrade his machine, etc. It's not as if he's going to make any money from his software when he's giving it away for free!
As for servers and such, put a page on sourceforge, and try to get a few mirrors up and running too (they will come, if the project is attractive).
Indeed; the question really is how to minimize the cost of releasing a piece of software. It'll never be zero, though. How viable is SourceForge as a free-software hosting business? Could they do that without the subsidy of selling products? I very much doubt it. Their hosting is essentially a publicity and marketing expense for them, as I say, the money's got to come from somewhere.
You have touched on some topics that I believe are very important. When I said free, I meant freeware, but it will not be open. I am a big believer in open source. In the future, we hope to contribute a project to the open source community that will augment this offering. Unfortunately, we must keep the upcoming software proprietary, because a portion of our revenue model comes from controlling the code.
Another concern, which is highlighted by your comments, is that I want to make sure we do not make people angry by not fully disclosing our intentions for the use of the software. The idea is that we give away the software to individuals in a form that can be very useful to them without forcing them to spend money, but charge a fee for added functionality that will benefit businesses. This analogy has nothing to do with the real functionality, but think of it as if we are offering the first instant messenger, which we all know is very useful to individuals without paying anything. A business may want encryption or user management services, but they would have to pay us for that service.
This is a very powerful community and I hope that people here will get involved with the beta. I will submit a story with more information in the future and let the moderators decide if they see it as useful software to slashdot users.
By the way, sorry about the wrong category move, but it was enlightening nonetheless.
Thanks again,
Chip