On the other hand, German public money had been the most important sponsor of GPG for quite a while. Unfortunately that stopped long ago, I guess all the reason

On the other hand, German public money had been the most important sponsor of GPG for quite a while. Unfortunately that stopped long ago, I guess all the reasons for that can be broken down to "it was too cheap" in one way or another... When you try to buy software like this through conventional state procurement mechanism you'll inevitably waste a lot of money, but it would be really cheap to "grow" it through supporting an environment where that can happen. Why doesn't Werner Koch have a position in academia? Third party funding of whole departments is commonplace and is always a blind bet trusting that the grantees will come up with something rewarding.