ESRI MDB yet to be decoded?

I've often wondered why ESRI's Arc products are not more interoperable with
the rest of the software world.  After all, some degree of sharing should be
possible by reading their formats.  Today, i encountered this info:

"ESRI software writes coordinate data to the ESRI MDB Geodatabase as a
Binary Long Data type in an unpublished binary encoding manner, the
functionality required to access such a data type is still to be
developed.."

I am curious if this is still true - free software cannot adopt/interoperate
with "Geodatabases" because some required reverse engineering has yet to be
done?

-Ben