a project to simplify installation of open source software
on Mac OS X and Darwin
Darwin is a free, open source, Unix-like operating system first released by Apple Computer in 2000. It is also the core set of components upon which Mac OS X was developed. In April 2002 the ISC and Apple founded OpenDarwin, a community to foster cooperative Darwin development. OpenDarwin creates its own releases of the Darwin OS. A notable subproject of OpenDarwin is DarwinPorts, which has the goal of assembling a next-generation collection of ports to Darwin.
In July 2003 Apple released Darwin under version 2.0 of the APSL license, which the Free Software Foundation (FSF) approved as a free software license. Previous releases had taken place under an earlier version of the APSL that did not meet the FSF's definition of free software, although it met the requirements of the Open Source Definition.
DarwinPorts is a project to simplify installation of open source software on the Mac OS X and Darwin operating systems. Similar to Fink, DarwinPorts was started in 2002 as part of the OpenDarwin project, with the involvement of a number of Apple Computer employees including Landon Fuller, Kevin Van Vechten, and Jordan Hubbard. It allows the installation of a number of packages by simply entering port install packagename command in the Terminal, which will then download, compile and install the requested software, while also installing any required dependencies automatically. On April 28, 2005, the project released version 1.0 of their software which supports approximately 2500 ports. The most recent version 1.2.1 was released on April 1, 2006, providing over 3200 ports.