The porting of freely available software, while perhaps not as
gratifying as developing your own from scratch, is still a vital part
of FreeBSD's growth and of great usefulness to those who wouldn't
otherwise know where to turn for it. All ported software is organized
into a carefully organized hierarchy know as ``the ports collection''.
The collection enables a new user to get a quick and complete overview
of what's available for FreeBSD in an easy-to-compile form. It also
saves considerable space by not actually containing the the majority
of the sources being ported, but merely those differences required for
running under FreeBSD. See
The ports collection
for more information on using the ports collection and
Porting applications
for guidelines on
creating new ports. You may also send mail to
<ports@freebsd.org>.
Whichever way you decide to contribute, we hope you'll find it an enjoyable and rewarding process. Such contributions are also very valuable to FreeBSD's continued progress, and as a free software effort, the more we all put in the more we all get back out of it!