Would online poker benefit from 3rd party clients?

[Ludanto]

Imagine Poker Stars (or any other major online poker room) would publish something like an application programming interface which would describe how to connect and communicate with the Poker Stars server.

The way would be clear for any kind of commercial or open source client and a new market could be born. Suddenly a huge amount of restrictions would disappear and many new +EV and -EV aspects would be available to the users.

I first started to think about an open source client because there are flaws in functionality (IMHO) and appearance in every client I have used until now. But with openly publishing an online poker server API there are things possible which reach a lot farther than simple appearance changes or one-click-sit-in buttons.

I can think of many interesting and powerfull stuff that could be done this way. But I am wondering what other peoples thoughts are.

Please feel free to speak your mind.