He's been voluntarily cheated. He should take a job, take care of himself (no one else will), and give gpg whatever time he has left, if he has the energy.
Whether he's been cheated or not depends on your values. Many people cheerfully give up revenue maximization in order to perform some service they perceive to be of great value. You can't really have a meaningful political movement without such people.
At 53 years old and $25,000/year, he almost certainly has not prepared for any reasonably comfortable or safe/secure retirement (not knowing anything else about his personal life). There will come a point where he simply cannot work. He must take care of himself first. Or, to put it another way, if he doesn't take care of himself, then he'll reach a point where he can no longer take care of GPG, much less any dependents.
He lives in Germany, I imagine they have some form of a state retirement program.
I'm actually curious now of how many first world countries are as backwards as the US where if you retire without any personal savings you are extremely screwed.
You are not that much better off in Germany or generally North Europe, because pensions are earned through payments during career (three pillars: tax-like mandatory contribution, voluntary contribution, and thirdly a private insurance), and if you are not able to accumulate that kind of savings (which in some cases are more like "years worked for system" than actual money saved) then your old-age pension is going to be not entirely unlike the old-age social security in the U.S.
It's not normally in me, but I'd like to be a little forgiving toward users of GPG and similar infrastructure, particularly money-making BigCos. Open source, particularly reliance on open source by said MM BigCos, is relatively new.
It may not be financial ingratitude. It may be that we just haven't reached a sensible equilibrium between the two symbiotic ecosystems. At some point in the future, "due diligence" might commonly include identifying these sorts of tools, and their developers, and deciding either to not use the tool or to fund the tool's health.
By the time he searches for a new job, interviews, successfully gets a new job, stops contributing, and people finally NOTICE that he's abandoned the project: it's already too late.
You can offer him all the $5 donations in the world, but he has a full-time job now and has no reason to return to this life of "financial ingratitude".
I'm pretty sure we all would miss him working on it, either directly or indirectly, I think, as developers, we do a horrible job of assessing our blind spots when it comes to infrastructure.
I'm not saying that GPG is exactly where it needs to be, but is it lost? The code is out there and it is in use by many around the world. Just to play devil's advocate, what's wrong with stopping development on it?
I think it is cruel, heartless and selfish to expect a poor man to work for the benefit of the world without benefit to himself. If it's done by free will it is awesome, but is astoundingly arrogant to expect someone to do it by default.
That is absolutely not what would happen. Some organization that relies on it would fork it and maintain the fork. It would be highly likely they would even ask him to consult.
