Who is behind the ports?

[Charles A. Landemaine]

I was amazed to see that there are 16102 available ports, I was also
amazed looking at this graphic:
http://www.freebsd.org/ports/growth/status.png

How is it possible? How many people are helping porting applications?
There's gotta be millions to maintain each new versions of so many
applications...

Is there some sort of automation creating so many ports?
Thanks in advance!

-- 
Charles A. Landemaine.