> They "make a difference"? How exactly?
KDE so far:
* Is used productively by large numbers of users doing cool stuff, from your fellow developers to the scientists controlling the Large Hadron Collider to the VFX artists who made Gravity
* Helped popularize open source as a development and licensing model, which now comprises much of the industry
* Helped Linux get attenttion and grow, ditto
* Wrote technology in use on billions of computers (KHTML -> WebKit, large parts of Qt via tight symbiosis, taglib, ...)
* Had a strong effect on industry tool choices (e.g. raising up CMake into the de-facto cross-platform C++ build system by adopting and helping improve it with requests and code, or hosting the valgrind bug tracker, or helping make SVN scale after adopting it as replacement for CVS)
* Has made many hundreds of people more experienced and competent engineers through providing mentorship, and enabled them to apply those skills and that knowledge elsewhere
Most of these are ongoing.
Considering how easy it is in this industry to spend your days making things no one needs or wants, or worse, actively screws over people, I'm pretty happy with how I spent my last ~12 years as a KDE developer :)
