Our Dear Project Leader, Stefano Zacchiroli, regularly mentions the fact that there's an amount of Debian money available for hardware sponsoring of Debian developers, but it seems that not much people benefit from it.
Each time I saw one of this reminder, I wonder if I should apply, and the anser is usually no. The fact is that I don't think any new laptop or desktop to do my Debian stuff, and the last time I bought a box (my x201s last summer) it was not really specifically for Debian tasks so I didn't dare to ask (not to mention the fact I bought it because I did have the money to do so).
And I think this is mostly the problem. I might be wrong, but I think that most people which could benefit from this just don't dare asking or don't estimate themselves eligible for it.
When I saw Ben Hutchings post, where the first thing he says is about how hardware is expensive, I thought « hey, he should get some Debian money for buying new hardware: building kernel is really time consuming and having multiple powerful cores, more ram and fast disks/SSDs really helps ». Turns out that Ben just didn't really want to spend too much money there, but the case still stands. We also see from time to time people saying they'll be offline for a while because of broken laptop or something like that. Once again, maybe those people wouldn't mind some help from the Debian project, and maybe they just don't think about asking, or they don't dare.
So thinking about it a bit more, I think I wouldn't dare asking money for myself, but maybe I could dare asking money for other people (this is a bit like the flattr posts by Raphaël Hertzog, where he incited people to give money to projects he liked). If I'm not alone in this case, maybe those Debian developers who think some of their peers would benefit some hardware could drop them a mail with leader@ on copy, to propose just that. No need for huge publicity on that (in order to not embarass people), though the transparency rules still apply when it comes to Debian money.
