If you haven’t heard about this, you haven’t been paying attention 
But here it is anyway…
http://www.sun.com/2006-1113/feature/index.jsp
I know it’s not strictly Ruby-related, but it does mean that JRuby will
now have a best-class open-source JVM under it. So other than prejudices
folks might have about the design of Java or the JVM, there’s now no
political reason why you couldn’t run JRuby on a typical OSS system.
Anyway, exciting news for Sun, Java, and everyone with a stake in such
things.