Sounds like an unfortunate situation, but without knowing what the communication even looked like, let alone the technical fallout - I'd be very careful to NOT pass any political judgement.
No, I don't follow the development of FreeBSD or the Ports Collection closely enough to make informed conclusions about the actions of an individual dev. It's not out of question that the chain of understanding or trust got broken somewhere along the way. A lot of other possibilities are not out of question, either.
I'm just hoping this gets resolved with level-headed approaches before it snowballs into a debacle where it's hard to separate facts from uninformed commentary offered by outsiders.