Get real. This has nothing to do with Oracle's license price which incidentally they have lots of competition on from Mickeysoft. All of the license costs are incidental to the real price of a system.
New technology only gets adopted where it makes both economic and technical sense.
In reality economic and technical judgments are just two different ways of assessing the same thing. ODBMSs only get used where the data modeling and/or performance requirements make disproportionate subjective sense to the decision maker and they only have traction in applications long term where the subjective judgment maps to the objective (where the original decision maker's successor sees more good then harm in the fancy technical solution he/she inherits). Often the ODBMS is in effect competing with both a RDBMS and a commercial UNIX vendor since "throw more hardware at it" is a lot more acceptable solution to performance problems then anything as wild as an ODBMS. Linux and ODBMSs are natural pairings since they both make obvious economic sense but appear risky to business types.
The easiest cases are those where only a lunatic would think of using a relational system followed quickly by places where relational has already failed and the project is too important to abandon. The interesting thing is that ODBMS vendors can actually survive and in some cases prosper farming the rocky land left to them by the accepted RDBMS wisdom. Adverse times lead to rapid and arduous natural selection rewarding the fast & smart and killing the opposite. Hard times are good for the breed, unless they kill it off :-).
Oh, I work for an ODBMS vendor.
