>>16
It's, like I said, mostly read-only. By that I mean you can rewrite part of it and hack it, but it's kind of like C++ sauce and executable code. Too much is lost in the process to make anything useful of editing it.
>>17
DOC allows you to do something useful with what you get; for example, converting to HTML. Adobe's shit is a piece of shit (and it's not really open), and it's specifically designed to be hard to copy and not useful to edit, plus it now includes digital restrictions management and all the shit you can expect from Adobe.