That would be OK. The main reason I did the RUBY_VERSION check is that I wanted to make it clearer that ssl_version is not going to be passed to Net::HTTP. The patch as written does an additional check in the initializer to avoid setting +@ssl_version+, and you don't have access to a Net::HTTP object at that time.

It probably depends on your system SSL configuration. I expect that in general without a version it will allow SSLv2, which would be a security risk except that the vast majority of well-configured servers disallow SSLv2 anyway.