On Tuesday Microsoft released over 14,000 pages of documentation concerning Sharepoint Server 2007, Exchange 2007, and MS Outlook 2007 as well as the communications protocols used these products. The documentation was released on the company’s MSDN site as part of the openness pledge it made following the recent EU court judgment against the company.

The good news is that open source developers can use the published protocol information to develop clients that interact with Microsoft servers using the same feature sets available to Microsoft software clients. We may finally see open source email and calendaring applications that can natively integrate with corporate MS Exchange servers. Outlook’s stranglehold on the enterprise IT email client market may soon come to an end.

From the recent spate of open source project acquisitions by large software vendors to the increasingly popular model of offering paid “enterprise” versions of open source software, we’ve all noticed the changes in the open source community. Some consider these trends part of the maturing of the open source software market, while others view these trends as potentially dangerous to fundamental open source concepts.

For those who are worried, things may have just gotten a little worse. Adobe’s announcement of its AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) platform for Linux is the case in point.