The main advantage of the ports system when compared with a binary distribution model is that the installation can be tuned and optimized according to available resources.
Jordan Hubbard committed his port make macros to the FreeBSD CVS repository on August 21, 1994.
[5] DragonFly BSD however built their own ports implementation called dports with the release 3.4[6] and switched over to it completely with 3.6.
In late October 2007, OpenBSD developer Nikolay Sturm announced that -stable ports tree should be considered unmaintained due to the lack of resources.
In 2009, it was decided to revive the -stable ports tree under supervision of Robert Nagy and Jasper Lievisse Adriaanse.