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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..."
If you're worried about crashing your servers, create a project on Sourceforge and host your source code & binaries there.
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). 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).
As for the actual release, try to make a good presentation about the project, what it is meant to do, where you want to go with the development, and encourage a developers community with a forum of some sort (mailing list), also, most open source projects must have screenshots (why, I don't know?).
If the project is attractive, and you work hard enough you'll gather a group of power users. These users are great, ask them what they want, how they want it, and tell them to talk to you about anything that bugs them. You'll need all the feedback you can get.
Finally, and most importantlly: do not expect to have others working for you, they may report bugs, send small patches, you'll have to do most work, at least in the beginning.