Macports helped a lot with open-source on the Mac, but I wouldn't say it solved the imagemagick problem.

Imagemagick, or one of its many dependencies, would often be broken, and when it worked it would still take a ridiculously long time to download and compile (unless you remembered to specify "no-x", setting aside the fact that you had to know that variant existed in the first place).

I used Macports for a long time, and it worked well for installing mysql, git, and all the other open-source software I used, but the imagemagick install was painful enough that I still kept around my own script to build it until homebrew came around.