MacPorts describes itself, on its own site, as “an open-source community initiative to design an easy-to-use system for compiling, installing, and upgrading either command-line, X11 or Aqua based open-source software on the Mac operating system.” The copyright notice on the site spans 2002 to the present, marking 2002 as the project’s founding year.
The project began life as DarwinPorts, an effort connected to Apple’s open-source group, and was modeled on the ports system used by the BSD family of operating systems: a tree of small build recipes (called Portfiles) that describe how to fetch source code and compile each package from scratch on the user’s machine. This compile-from-source approach was inherited directly from the BSD ports tradition.
For most of the 2000s MacPorts was the dominant way to bring Unix and open-source command-line software to macOS, predating Homebrew by several years. The site notes that MacPorts has participated in Google Summer of Code “since 2007,” reflecting a long-running, actively maintained community project.
MacPorts and Homebrew remain the two best-known package managers for the Mac, differing mainly in philosophy: MacPorts builds and manages its own self-contained dependency tree, while Homebrew leans more on the libraries already present on the system.