Apple developed — and for many years afterwards, hosted —- MacPorts.

Apple employees did. Not Apple themselves. As for hosting, it was hosted on an equivalent of SourceForge, where many other opensource projects unaffiliated with Apple were.

And we all know how MacPorts failed to actually gain any significant momentum.

No, Apple employees originally authored the project on Apple’s time.

And it was first hosted at OpenDarwin — which was Apple-run and not available for arbitrary public hosting.

It was then hosted at OpenDarwin’s successor — Mac OS Forge. That was also Apple-run and not available for arbitrary project hosting.

MacPorts was an Apple-authored and ultimately Apple-supported project for ~15 years.

As for momentum, the project is still going strong 25 years later, so I’m not really sure what you’re referring to.

> As for momentum, the project is still going strong 25 years later, so I’m not really sure what you’re referring to.

I am referring to a significant momentum. You know, like the momentum Brew has.

I think you're right - it's one of the reasons I prefer a mac as a dev platform.