It was not about proprietary smartcards but about the proprietary driver software required to use those smartcards.
If the vendors would open the specs of their smartcards it would be easy to write a driver. Some did and we support them in GnuPG. Most of them don't and we may even assume they want to hide their little secrets in their drivers. It is all the same as with all the proprietary hardware drivers. Look at decades of LKML for similar discussions.
Gpg is not a port of some PGP version but an implementation of rfc4880 and earlier open standards. I actually took great care not to look at any "open source" PGP code. The reasons why dual-licensing does not work is that I assigned the copyright to the FSF in 1998 and when I terminated that contract 2 years ago too many other other hackers have code in it or assigned it to the FSF. Thus there is no way for anyone to switch to a dual-license.
Politics, internal power struggles, all the usual things in an administration. I also heard this is not yet set in stone and may change again with their next president. BTW, he meant the BSI (Federal IT security agency) and not the BND (foreign secret service, aka the CIA's German stable lads).
You may donate to Wau Holland, who take bitcoins for gnupg.
Stripe announced a long time ago that they will support bitcoins and they seem to have a closed Beta for this. However it has still not gone live. I try to avoid working with yet another payment provider just for converting bitcoins to Euros. For bookkeeping it is much easier not to take care of assets with large fluctuation.
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