Once you have a product, free or not, which is used and relied upon by a large group of people, you do owe them something. if you don't want that responsibility then don't release your code or get out when things become serious. I get the OSS philosophy, and I like many things about it, but I also understand why some won't touch it with a ten foot pole.

"Oh, I made a boneheaded error and now your code is 100x slower than it should be? Tough sh*t, fix it yourself. I owe you nothing!"

That's not a reasonable mentality to have if you want adoption. Obviously the Ruby devs don't feel this way, but you seem to. That sort of attitude is nonsense and short sighted.