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by otterley 3440 days ago
I'm concerned that all the open-source Solaris forks will lose all the reference documentation (see, e.g, http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/documentation/solaris-11-1...) if/when Oracle pulls the plug on Solaris.

Is there a way for this tragedy to be avoided?

1 comments

The Oracle docs are not really the reference documentation for the open-source stuff, since illumos and Oracle Solaris have diverged quite a bit by now. Some things are implemented in different ways. OpenZFS in illumos has many features not in the closed oracle zfs.

The real reference docs are the man pages [1]. Depending on the illumos distribution there are more task-oriented guides for OmniOS [2], OpenIndiana [3] or the SmartOS Wiki [4]. In-depth information (driver development, MDB, DTrace) is written down in the "illumos books" [5]. These are not in danger from oracle.

Sadly a lot of good historical documentation is already gone since oracle broke all the sun.com links and not even archive.org has those. :(

[1] https://illumos.org/man/

[2] https://omnios.omniti.com/wiki.php/GeneralAdministration

[3] http://docs.openindiana.org/handbook/getting-started/

[4] https://wiki.smartos.org/display/DOC/SmartOS+Users+Guide

[5] http://illumos.org/books/