an "open port" implies a listening daemon that accepts outside connections that are initiated from a remote node. The fact that a given default distro can "communicate" does not, by itself, imply that it has open ports as described above. For instance, I can initiate a ssh session to a remote server without having an SSH daemon process running on my own machine which is accepting connections. Consequently, any attempt to connect to an ssh server on my machine from a remote node would be fruitless as it doesn't exist. I hope that clears up the nomenclature issue.

If you want to see what's listening, you can either log on and run "netstat -an | grep LISTEN", or you can run an nmap port scan against it from an external machine (which is probably more useful in a practical sense as it reveals what's actually reachable through the network after various firewalls and the like have been passed instead of what theoretically is running according to the kernel).