The MacPorts Project is 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 OS X operating system. To that end we provide the command-line driven MacPorts software package under a BSD License, and through it easy access to thousands of ports that greatly simplify the task of compiling and installing open-source software on your Mac.
We provide a single software tree that attempts to track the latest release of every software title (port) we distribute, without splitting them into “stable” Vs. “unstable” branches, targetting mainly the current Mac OS X release (10.5, A.K.A Leopard) and the immediately previous one (10.4, A.K.A. Tiger). There are currently 4706 ports in our tree, distributed among 78 different categories, and more are being added on a regular basis.
For information on installing MacPorts please see the installation section of their site and explore the myriad of download options they provide and the base system requirements.