Seeking advice for taking a project open-source

You have two important choices to make initially.

Firstly which licence should you use? There are dozens of Open Source licences, but it basically boils down to whether you want copyleft (GPL/AGPL) or non-copyleft (BSD, MIT, Apache) and that depends on your own objectives.

Secondly, you need to choose a version control system and, assuming you won't be hosting it yourself, a provider. This is effectively a choice between Subversion or one of the distributed version control systems (Git, Mercurial, Bazaar, etc.). A DVCS may make it easier for you to manage contributions from other people if you don't want to give them write access to your master repository.

Choice of VCS will influence your choice of host and vice versa as most providers only offer one VCS. A provider that will also host a website and/or wiki for you would be ideal. Most will provide some kind of rudimentary issue tracker and possibly mailing lists. You can also get mailing lists from Librelist.

I would recommend that you take a look at GitHub or Launchpad. I'm not particularly keen on Google Code or Sourceforge. Nothing against Subversion, I just don't like their UIs.

If you want your project to become popular, and that might not be important to you, you'll have to promote it. You can register it with Ohloh and Freshmeat. Writing blog articles about your project and submitting them to sites like Reddit and DZone would increase visibility. Remember also that Jeff is offering free advertising on StackOverflow for Open Source projects.

Anyway, as long as you have a public source repository and a website for people to download the software from, just write code and the rest will follow.

If you're already familiar with VCS (Versioning Control System) you should be fine. I recommend www.github.org to host the repository, and maybe at some point a website to talk about the app. Github is nice because it makes it especially easy for people to contribute code. It's ridiculously simple, although git has a bit of a learning curve.

And then, a way to communicate! A mailing list.. Maybe googlewave.. Maybe a forum.

Read this book: Wikinomics

In one of the chapters, for example, the author explains the challenges faced by IBM when they first joined open source projects on Linux.