Why the OpenBSD project is still begging for hardware in 2017 is a mystery to me.

With all the IP they're sitting on, the OpenBSD Foundation should find a way to monetize at least one. OpenSSH alone is worth tons of money.

These are requests from developers, volunteers. Not the project itself.

Not a defense of finid's stupid comment, but the developers and volunteers basically are the project.

Requesting hardware this way makes a lot of sense. Hunting down oddball hardware isn't an ideal use of developer time, but it's the sort of thing OpenBSD's users, the ones reading the request, are probably very well equipped to help with. I have sent projects hardware a few times over the years as it gets decommissioned and it's helpful to know what is useful and what is not. I'm happy to see the hardware go somewhere where it continues to be useful.

Monetizing open source and free code will cause immense ill-will from developers and users, which would cost more reputation loss than just asking for hardware.

No it won't. MANY successful open source projects have monetization strategies. Open Source!=Charity. It's just another way to build software. It's also likely that a successfully monetized ope-source software lasts and succeeds longer by most metrics. Cases in point - Android, most Apache foundation projects (including Hadoop) ...

It's not always that clear cut.

While there are definitely bad, ill-will generating ways to generate revenue for Open Source projects... but at the same time there can be positive ways of doing it too.

It very much depends on the norms and expectation of the Community around any given project though. :)