Less Redundancy/reduced effort:
Currently NetBSD, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD all maintain their own separate ports/pkgsrc collections. They all have similar functionality and mostly the same application in them. When one application changes, it has to be updated in three different package collections. Darwin doesn’t yet have a package system, but will be adopting one soon, making four package systems that have to be maintained.
More Secure:
When a security hole is found in a 3rd party package, it has to be patched on three separate packaging systems, or marked broken/insecure until someone can get to it.
With one package system, it only has to be fixed in one place.
3rd party packages are not security audited by any of the projects. Auditing 3 separate packaging systems is not feasible. A single, unified packaging system could be audited more easily.
More Features:
Each BSD project has made enhancements to their packaging system that the other BSDs don’t have. These enhancements make the packaging system more secure, faster and robust.
We are taking all the best features from each group, not the least common denominators.
More Up-To-date packages
Each package is supposed to be maintained by a volunteer. There aren’t enough volunteers for all the packages in each BSD project. Packages that are popular and integral to BSD have a maintainer in each BSD project. Packages that are not so popular might have a maintainer in one of the BSD projects, but not the others. This leads to stagnation and bit rot.
A single package collection could make better use of the resources that are already hard at work maintaining the 3 separate BSD package collections. Each project could have the most up-to-date applications, with the least amount of work.
Makes BSD more unified.
This will help unify the BSD community and focus our efforts to make BSD a stronger force in the computer industry, while maintaining the individuality of each BSD project. It will allow you to choose which BSD you use based on what you need it for, rather than what applications come with it.