expiration of net/skype ?!

[Ion-Mihai Tetcu]

On Tue, 26 Apr 2011 10:29:16 +1000
Peter Jeremy <peterjeremy at acm.org> wrote:

> On 2011-Apr-26 01:47:30 +0200, martinko <gamato at users.sf.net> wrote:
> >So what is this deprecation and expiration of net/skype port please ??
> 
> Whilst the Skype port still works, the version of Skype referenced by
> the port is no longer available and later versions of Skype do not
> (currently) work on FreeBSD.  My reading of the Skype license suggests
> that the FreeBSD Project cannot host the distfile without an agreement
> with Skype.  This means that someone who doesn't currently have the
> Skype distfile cannot install the Skype port.

True, and we've kept it like this for a long time.
I have asked people at skype to allow us to redistribute the distfile,
but that's impossible for legal reasons (not theirs). 

> I believe work is underway to support the currently available version
> of Skype.

It is, and it's kinda workoing on HEAD plus some patches.
One thing all of oyu could do is bug skype on their forums to provide
an OSS version; I recently argued about that with their linux product
manager, so more voices would help.

-- 
Ion-Mihai Tetcu <itetcu at FreeBSD.org>