they're used e.g. with gems such as jruby-openssl the jruby.openssl.xxx namespace is used :
:~/workspace/oss/jruby$ jruby -J-Djruby.openssl.debug=true ...
jruby: warning: unknown property jruby.openssl.debug
jruby: warning: unknown property jruby.openssl.debug
... no longer works as it used to on JRuby 1.7