headius is at a jvm conf right now talking about optimizing JRuby, and here's a recent video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vxIncIm2D4

Well, JRuby runs on the JVM which is developed by Oracle. Basically, if you're a ruby user who wants good performance there's not many other places to turn.

But you know Oracle acquired Java long ago and other than Google, I'm unaware of Oracle causing problems for any other users. And Google is a rather special case - they reimplemented an incompatible version of Java without licensing it. You're not going to be doing that.

It's open source, the community can always fork it and move forwards if they dislike what Oracle does with it.