[xenophonf]

The short version is that, as I understand it, the FreeBSD Foundation does release engineering different than Canonical or SPI, largely for historical reasons, and that as an end user, you would periodically run "freebsd-update cron" or subscribe to "[e-mail]" to check for updates to FreeBSD itself or run "pkg upgrade" to check for updates to third-party packages. It's really, really simple compared to the "good" old days of cvsup and "make world" and roughly equivalent to "apt-get upgrade" or even "apt-get dist-upgrade" (or their YUM analogues).

The FreeBSD equivalent of "main" would be FreeBSD itself, with source/binary updates via freebsd-update or source updates via Subversion. The FreeBSD Ports infrastructure handles package building for _all_ third-party software (Xorg, GNOME, KDE, Emacs, Perl, etc.), which would be the equivalent of "universe" and "multiverse". The Ports infrastructure has integrated license auditing (see https://raw.githubusercontent.com/freebsd/freebsd-ports/mast... and https://raw.githubusercontent.com/freebsd/freebsd-ports/mast...), which allows you to accept or reject licenses at package build time.

There is no equivalent to "restricted". The binary package repository maintained by the FreeBSD Foundation itself only contains free software, meaning that it includes only software whose licenses allow (a) redistribution of the original sources (like an FTP mirror), (b) selling copies of the original sources (like on CD-ROM), (c) free redistribution of the binary package (e.g., via FTP), (d) selling of the binary package (e.g., via CD-ROM), and (e) automatic license acceptance (which would exclude software like dccd that have EULAs which must be accepted prior to compilation/installation).

There is no equivalent to "backports" or "security". Supported FreeBSD releases get regular bugfixes and security updates as described above. As FreeBSD is a volunteer effort, there just aren't enough people involved to make maintaining alternate ports trees feasible. The ports tree does get frozen and tagged at each FreeBSD release to facilitate package building, CD-ROM manufacturing, and FTP distribution, but those tags aren't maintained except as historical markers. If you want security updates, you need to stay abreast of the latest commits the ports tree (whether via portsnap [source], subversion [source], or pkgng [binary]).