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

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

Posted Nov 18, 2008 10:15 UTC (Tue) by Ze (guest, #54182)
In reply to: Give 1 Get 1 2008 Started in Europe and USA! (OLPC News) by dlang
Parent article: Give 1 Get 1 2008 Started in Europe and USA! (OLPC News)

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


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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.


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