So, I was going through a stack of podcasts that had piled up. One of them was an interview with Zed Shaw (creator of Mongrel) at http://ajaxian.com/podcast/. He pontificates about a number of things. It's an hour long, but of particular interest to me was when he was talking about the old Rails-In-The-Enterprise debate. He mentioned three key barriers to Rails in this area:
1. EAI (i.e. interfacing w/ legacy apps, arcane data sources, etc)
2. Authentication (very limited support now)
3. a Rails stack with good management tools (the JBoss or Websphere of Rails, as he puts it)

He purports that there is money to made here. With regards to point #3, even with the limited experience I have with this stuff, I spent a ton of time trying to get the right versions of all the little pieces I needed (i.e. Ruby, Mongrel, MySql, etc) working together, without success. I downloaded InstantRails (http://rubyforge.org/projects/instantrails/) and voila, I had my first RoR web app running in 5 minutes.

There's a bit towards the end where he makes an interesting comparison between the open source world to mass media where there's about a 1-to-99 percent producer to consumer ratio. In the open source world, he says that ratio should be about 5-to-95, and when it gets below that is when projects start to die off, underscoring the importance of getting involved in projects one cares about.