I'm not familiar with Urbit, but a quick glance at their website says that it's owned by the "Tlon Corporation," which I have to assume is a for profit company. Ethereum on the other hand is guided, but not owned or controlled by a non-profit foundation. Ethereum is a public utility and they have a mechanism for community involvement and contribution via Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIP). Hope that helps!
Urbit has always been open source—currently under the MIT license [1]—and same as Ethereum it's also guided by a non-profit foundation, the Urbit Foundation [2] established in 2021.
This is very outdated and Tlon no longer operates/runs urbit.org but, in any case, the ToS says this: "The Site is owned and operated by Tlon", so the reference was to the website "urbit.org", not the Urbit project.
Not having to deal with the distributed computing problems a blockchain provides. No worrying about any proof of stake slowdowns or overhead.
I don't think urbit is all that great, either, but this is coming from someone who decided to increase their investment in face to face conversations following social media starting to crumble.
>Not having to deal with the distributed computing problems a blockchain provides. No worrying about any proof of stake slowdowns or overhead
Ethereum operates perfectly smoothly, with zero downtime since launching 8 years ago. In any case, besides peripheral features like NFT-gated forums and Ethereum Name Service created proxy names, this doesn't use Ethereum's distributed network. Just the public key wallet software built for using Ethereum.