> Also, on the topic of lawsuits, how many small startups will go out of business if they get hit with a class action lawsuit every time their documentation accidentally diverges from reality?
I was chatting with a law academic of my acquaintance; her specialty is torts and in particularly, remedies to torts. We discussed some of the different sorts of actions you could bring.
Heroku in their Terms of Service 11.1 have language that basically says "we can change our technicals without telling you". And that's very reasonable. It would be impossible to test every minor change with every client's application. It would also be very annoying for clients to get dozens of emails per day of the form "Updated foolib-2.5.3-55 to foolib-2.5.3-56a".
But torts are a different beast; they live outside and alongside contracts. She could tell me what actions you could take in Australian torts law. We have a tort for "misleading and deceptive conduct" [1] which would probably be whistled up for this case, given the magnitude and length of the divergence, but that particular tort seems to be an Australian-only innovation. US law has, she told me, a lot of unique features that she hasn't studied very closely. Heroku's ToS requires all disputes to be settled under California law in Californian courts.
> Also, any small startup with a large competitor will have the large competitor paying people to sign up for the product with the sole intent of finding a bug in the documentation so that the small startup can be sued out of business.
Heroku also has ToS language to deter anti-competitive behaviour; not to mention anti-competitive practice laws. Plus, interference with a contract is itself legally troublesome.
Generally speaking, if you can think of a HUGE GAPING PROBLEM in the law, the lawyers and judges have already thought of it and closed it. Usually hundreds of years ago.
[1] There is also in Australian law a statutory offence of misleading and deceptive conduct, but that would not lead to remedies for Heroku customers.
Of course, I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.