Give 1 Get 1 2008 Started in Europe and USA! (OLPC News) [LWN.net]

Give 1 Get 1 2008 Started in Europe and USA! (OLPC News)

Posted Nov 17, 2008 23:38 UTC (Mon) by donbarry (guest, #10485)
Parent article: Give 1 Get 1 2008 Started in Europe and USA! (OLPC News)

Some context. Among other things, I find it amusing how much the finance
people get compared to the educational people. Remember, people,
the person pulling the puppetstrings on this empire is the one who
invoked Free Software to generate community buzz, then jettisoned
it as a core principle once the sleeping bear was awakened and
started dangling various inducements.

There's a quasi wiki discussion of both sides at:
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Controversies

Salaries reported on the IRS form 990 of the OLPC Association for 2006:
(available through guidestar.org -- registration required)

$233,333 Mark Foster VP Engineering (since departed)
$88,957 Khalid Hassounah Director of Education
$57,768 David Cavallo Dir of Central Amer(truncated in original)
$73,167 Melania Lewis Assistant to the Chairman (Negroponte)
$57,417 Lindsay Petrillose Special Assistant
$226,958 Walter Bender President (since departed)
$122,333 Robert Fadel Director of Finance, OLPC Association
$122,333 Robert Fadel salary as Director OLPC Foundation
$226,333 Mary Lou Jepsen Chief Technology Officer (since departed)
$185,539 Michail Bletsas Chief Connectivity
$182,417 Jim Gettys VP Software Engineer

to post comments

Give 1 Get 1 2008 Started in Europe and USA! (OLPC News)

Posted Nov 17, 2008 23:43 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (2 responses)

and your point is?

Give 1 Get 1 2008 Started in Europe and USA! (OLPC News)

Posted Nov 18, 2008 10:15 UTC (Tue) by Ze (guest, #54182) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm guessing that something supposed to be a charity case , it's unsightly for people to be profiting off it.

Give 1 Get 1 2008 Started in Europe and USA! (OLPC News)

Posted Nov 18, 2008 18:55 UTC (Tue) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

welcome to the real world. people need to make a living, even when working at a non-profit.

some of the salaries listed are substantially lower then those people could make at commercial companies.

you would need to look closely at their entire financial statement, but I believe that they have two sets of cash flow, one for building and deploying the laptops, and one to run the organization (keep in mind that the laptop portion had no income until late last year, they had other income to run things prior to that)

the thing to look for in a non-profit is how much of the money they get does useful stuff (as opposed to paying for the overhead and salaries of the non-profit) for many non-profits this can be as bad as 30% of the total, a non-profit that gets this to the 70-90% range is considered extremely efficiant.

if OLPC distributed 500K laptops in the last year at a overall cost of $200 each (between the manufacturing and distributing costs) that would be a budget of 100M. the salaries listed are ~1% of this total, they have other costs (servers, travel, etc), but this is not looking bad at all.

the overhead of having Amazon deal with the orders for this years G1G1 program will probably be a larger chunk of cash than it takes to run the OLPC organization for the rest of the year.

Give 1 Get 1 2008 Started in Europe and USA! (OLPC News)

Posted Nov 18, 2008 4:08 UTC (Tue) by jwb (guest, #15467) [Link] (1 responses)

It looks to me like the highest paid individual was the veep of engineering.

Give 1 Get 1 2008 Started in Europe and USA! (OLPC News)

Posted Nov 18, 2008 10:49 UTC (Tue) by pterjan (guest, #48447) [Link]

Actually no, the highest one seems to be Robert Fadel with 2x$122,333 :)
The only line which seems very surprising is the low salary of the Director of Education compared to all others