Disclaimer: I don't know this personally, just going on what I heard on a podcast.

My understanding is that these events they host are sort of like conferences where they find some space and get hackers together for hack fests and to build stuff. It's collaborative and while they don't pay the devs, they have expenses.

I don't know how good the ROI is, but it's certainly an interesting model.

I was about to donate until I read things like this and their initiatives like promotion. The incentives are all wrong - donations should go to actual expenses (hosting, hardware, dev meetups, bounties on large contributions), not amassing influence. Wikimedia is an example of everything wrong with not-for-profits, not a model to emulate.

What if we could direct donations to specific components of KDE? I have some longstanding bugs I’d be happy to pay someone to fix.