Well, that's not entirely precise - Riak was provided by Basho in form of old style binary backage, that had number of issues:
* was not working with soon-to-be-default pkg-ng toolset, what's important for those using it, as you cant switch back to old toolset, once you've used new one
* had unnecessary dependencies, like sudo (port is patched to use su from base system) and OpenSSL in certain version, which often was no longer in ports, and that required using libmap.conf, that, while working, was suboptimal
Building from source, sure. But look how many dependencies are required, and some of them, like OpenSSL are problematic. The port, while also building from sources, is slightly different, doesnt require that much stuff to build/run, but also is giving you a way to build a binary package, so you wont have to compile it on every machine, and it will work with both old and new pkg toolset.
It is - the 'ported' keyword in FreeBSD world means added to Ports tree, and that it will be available as a binary package from freebsd.org repositories.
