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MacRuby is an implementation of Ruby 1.9 built on top of Cocoa. It's also OS X-only. See http://macruby.org

RubyMotion is fully compiled, and built on top of LLVM. See http://www.rubymotion.com/features/

They are both compiled and built on top of LLVM. RubyMotion is a fork of MacRuby, not a different design.

And as of last week, with the 2.0 release, you can now build desktop apps using RubyMotion as well. I kind of think that was the nail in the MacRuby coffin, for better or for worse.

RubyMotion is derived from MacRuby. MacRuby hasn't seen much development in some time, I would recommend investing your time in RubyMotion instead.

You can learn Ruby for free; you don't need RubyMotion or any other paid software for that.

FWIW there is a 30 day money back guarantee for Ruby Motion (which my company may make use of if we decide to stick with Objective-C).

I'm not following this at all. Justify the cost of what? There's no cost to learn Ruby.

He's talking about the cost of RubyMotion - $200