OSS from Non-Developers for Non-Developers?

chrisatslashdot asks: "By training and title I am a Mechanical Engineer. I have never been involved with any serious software development although I am competent to develop quality code. Because the company that I work for will not purchase a canned software package, I am developing a web based CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management System). I GPLed the project and put it on SourceForge hoping to help other people in my situation. The project is attracting much more attention than I anticipated. I have observed the development of many OSS projects but almost all of these have been by developers, targeted to developers. So what advice can you give a novice software developer on managing an open source project? What dangers and pitfalls await me? How does one foster more developer involvement? What resources should I exploit to keep from screwing this project up?"

Comments

What's a pressure gauge?

[orthogonal]

By training and title I am a Mechanical Engineer. I have never been involved with any serious software development

By training and experience I'm a software developer. I've never been involved with any serious mechanical engineering.

I plan to build a steam engine. I don't know anything about the tensile strength of the metals I'll be using, or how to calculate the steam pressure.

But I figure, hey, it can't be that hard, right?

So why won't anyone sell me life insurance once I tell them about my project?