Looks like it's a personal directory for Leslie Lamport (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Lamport), who is cited several times in the paper. Think of it as a professor hosting research papers that cite him in his field on his university site, rather than a business site.
And that use his research. Lamport created TLA+.
Actually, there is a lot of respect for AWS at Microsoft. Huge partners and competitors.
Think about it as Microsoft giving you access for free to a good doc for the whole world. Also known as "don't look at the gift horse in the tooth."
TLA and much of the initial research in distributed systems (paxos!) came from Lamport who has been at microsoft for years now. if you look at the references in the document, many point to his work.