Ruby is copyrighted free software by Yukihiro Matsumoto .
You can redistribute it and/or modify it under either the terms of the GPL
(see COPYING.txt file), or the conditions below:

1. You may make and give away verbatim copies of the source form of the
software without restriction, provided that you duplicate all of the
original copyright notices and associated disclaimers.

2. You may modify your copy of the software in any way, provided that
you do at least ONE of the following:

JRuby is a Java implementation of the Ruby interpreter, being developed by the JRuby team.
JRuby is free software released under a three-way CPL/GPL/LGPL license.
JRuby is tightly integrated with Java to allow the embedding of the interpreter into any Java application with full two-way access between the Java and the Ruby code (compare Jython for the Python language).

This is definitely not an apples vs apples comparison. Unless you think about it from the over all impact of the movement on the enterprise. I think you'll find them to be two solutions to the same problem... Getting more done with less.

RailsConf
RailsConf, co-produced by Ruby Central, Inc. and O'Reilly Media, Inc., is the largest official conference dedicated to everything Rails. Through keynotes, sessions, tutorials, panels, and events, RailsConf is an interactive meeting ground for the most innovative and successful Rails experts and companies. The conference provides attendees with examples of business models, development paradigms, and design strategies to enable mainstream businesses and new arrivals to the Web and Rails to take advantage of this new generation of services and opportunities.

RubyConf
Every year since 2001, Ruby Central, Inc. has produced RubyConf, the International Ruby conference. Attendance grew by a factor of ten between 2001 and 2006. RubyConf has provided a forum for presentations about Ruby technologies by their creators, including talks by Nathaniel Talbot on Test Unit, Jim Weirich on Rake, David Heinemeier Hansson on Ruby on Rails, Why the Lucky Stiff on the YAML library, and Sasada Koichi on YARV. Matz has attended, and spoken at, all the RubyConfs but one.
RubyKaigi

Events for the Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Merb, and other events.

If languages are defined by standards, what makes them open source? Well, the specification itself can be proprietary. You'll find in older main frame languages if you wanted the specifications you had to pay huge amounts of money for the detailed specifications.

The second opportunity is the implementation itself. For example with Ruby, there are several implementations, all of them happen to be open source.

List of founders from the ruby project (place holder)

Yukihiro Matsumoto (松本行弘, Matsumoto Yukihiro?, a.k.a. Matz, born 14 April 1965) is a Japanese computer scientist and software programmer best known as the chief designer of the Ruby programming language and its reference implementation, Matz's Ruby Interpreter (MRI).

Current status of ruby place holder