Well, first, I don't know the original motivation for opendbx... Maybe Norbert wanted to (sort of) decouple his C application from a specific driver. The thing is that it's not simple to track its users.
Then, alive as "it compiles and it works in latest versions of OSs", it is :). I did the whole compilation for the three platforms and drivers about a month ago.
On the other side, alive as "it is adding new features from time to time", it's not. Maybe because database drivers do not evolve also too much, nor they change their API. The latest changes, from about a year ago were some bugfixes to ODBC and fixing some compilation stuff for windowze.
Following EstebanL's comment, we would like to get completely rid of it, but so far it's useful to connect to databases that otherwise we couldn't, like oracle. For other vendors, such as Mysql or PGsql, there are the pure smalltalk versions of the drivers, which are probably better from the maintenance point of view.
Guille