> I'm not from the crypto community, but putting Skein into FreeBSD seems a very strange choice, especially because it looks to be motivated by the "Schneier" brand. Apart from SHA-3 (which is already there), BLAKE2 would have been a better alternative.

This does reek a bit of the "Schneier Brand", but for what it's worth, Bruce hasn't developed horrible cryptographic primitives:

Block ciphers: Blowfish (bcrypt is based on the expensive Blowfish key schedule), Twofish (an AES finalist), Threefish (based on Skein).

Stream ciphers: Solitaire (a classical algorithm with playing cards), Helix (authenticated stream cipher), Phelix (authenticated stream cipher submitted to ECRYPT)

Random number generators: Yarrow (inital CSPRNG), Fortuna (CSPRNG replacing Yarrow- FreeBSD and OS X/iOS /dev/random)

Generic hashing algorithms: Skein (a SHA-3 finalist)

What I find interesting, is the monocultures created in cryptography. You have the NSA/NIST monoculture (3DES, AES, SHA-1, SHA-2, SHA-3), the Schneier monoculture (Blowfish/bcrypt, Fortuna, Skein) and the Berstein monoculture (Poly1305, Curve25519, ChaCha20). It seems to me that if you're against the NIST standards and NSA designs, then you're likely in the Schneier or Berstein monocultures, with possibly some overlap.

What bothers be about being anti-NIST or anti-NSA, is forgetting that we have some great algorithms that already exist, such as AES and SHA-2, that are well-studied, well-implemented, and near ubiquitous. I'm not saying we should just stick with those primitives, and I'm glad cryptographers are thinking of more, such as BLAKE2 and Argon2.

So, I guess this whole discussion boils down to "why?". Why is Skein being added to FreeBSD? What is the need? Is the package manager moving to file integrity with Skein? Is ZFS? Some other need? Or is this getting added, because of the Schneier monoculture, and the need to be "anti-NIST/NSA"? I tend to believe its the latter.