Why Sponsor OpenLayers?
-----------------------

Many organizations work with individual developers to meet particular needs
in using Open Source software development. The standard model of open source
development tends to be a 'scratch your own itch' model, where a developer 
solves problems as they affect the developer, or an organization funds a 
developer based on the same kind of need to solve a specific problem.

Scratching specific itches is beneficial for when organizations have a specific
itch. However, the success of OpenLayers as a project can achieve more than
that: there are now many organizations that have an investment in the ongoing
success of the OpenLayers project as a whole. Supporting the OpenLayers
community ensures that the project is able to continue to succeed at solving
the problems raised by the community as are needed. 

Some example tasks which the community might be able to undertake with 
sufficient funding, but which generally lack sufficient community support for
completion without such funding are better memory management, performance
improvements, and improved documentation. These tasks all allow for the project
as a whole to succeed in ways that few specific organizations have a strong
individual desire for, but a more general fund might build up enough support
for that they get priority. Since these tasks tend to be time consuming, and
with comparitively reward to individual developers, they often times get left
out of core development activities, something that funding from the project 
might help change. 

There are many organizations which base a fair amount of their success upon the
success of the OpenLayers project.  With that being the case, even though these
organizations may not have any specific needs from the OL project, they still
depend on OpenLayers continuing to succeed as a project -- supporting new
browsers as they come out, improving upon things which might be bugs, etc.
Organizations like this may not have any specific itch to scratch, but also
don't have the resources to replace OpenLayers should the project fail, so it
may be in their best interests to support the project monetarily to ensure
continued community success.

By acting as a sponsor, organizations also get to use this fact in their
marketing materials. In the same way that purchasing a sponsorship slot
at a conference gets your name and logo in a prominent place in
conference materials, purchasing a sponsorship for OpenLayers gets your
name and logo in what may be a prominent place on our website/in our
marketing materials. It means that people can recognize that your
organization directly supports the OpenLayers project.  Sponsorship
allows for organizations which don't have the same level of developer
resources as code contributing organizations to get the same kind of
participation in a project that they support. 

Sponsorship offers a number of benefits to the sponsor in a more indirect way
than scratching an itch.  By collaborating with other sponsors, tasks which are
too large for individual developers to undertake directly can be tackled at the
discretion of the PSC through distribution of sponsorship funds. Sponsoring
helps ensure the success of the project as a whole -- impotant for
organizations which depend critically on OpenLayers. Sponsoring has a certain
marketing appeal, and can help to popularize supporters of the OpenLayers
project even if they can't contribute development resources directly, and
sponsorship helps to allow for the determination of future direction by
providing a direct pipeline to the project steering committee for sponsors to
offer project direction feedback.

By sponsorsing OpenLayers, organizations can help ensure the future stability
of a community of developers who have demonstrated their support for creating
a world-class web-mapping JavaScript library.