Throw a novice Ubuntu user into a FreeBSD system, and tell him to install a port, and 9 times out of 10 they'll freak out once they see GCC output on the screen.
Nothing against Ubuntu (RedHat, SuSE, Debian, Arch, et. al.), but source compilation is something they all have been letting their users avoid for a long time. The target audience is different.
That's because linux commands are generally quiet unless something goes wrong. ./configure, make and gcc can produce pages of output even when nothing is wrong.
Even when there's a compilation step it can be hidden. Homebrew on OS X does compile each package, but produces no actual compiler output. VMWare Player regularly recompiles kernel modules when it detects a kernel upgrade invalidating them. To the user it looks like an bullet list installation step.
Nope, he does not mean open a port. Ports is the name of the packaging system FreeBSD uses, and a port is the equivalent (more or less) of an RPM or deb source package.
If your server had a network connection problem and you needed to open up a port, we're already talking about network ports, not software, so you would try to diagnose your network.
If you asked me how you could get the old game `rogue` on your system, I would tell you to go install the freebsd-games port, which has nothing to do with networking, and so it clearly means that you need to look in your ports tree.
Arch has a Ports-inspired system called Pkgbuild. Given the level of competence the distro expects of the user to start with, I doubt most Arch users would have a great deal of trouble adapting to FreeBSD.
I've rarely seen macports, FreeBSD ports, or NetBSD ports used as a harness to install modified versions of software. Hack jobs are almost always manual, so this purported benefit is a canard.
Nothing against Ubuntu (RedHat, SuSE, Debian, Arch, et. al.), but source compilation is something they all have been letting their users avoid for a long time. The target audience is different.