We regularly grant address space to give motivated contributors real ownership and authority over the network. Contributions include education, promotion, and development efforts.
It solves the hard problems of implementing a peer-to-peer network (including identity, NAT traversal, and exactly-once delivery) in the kernel so app developers can focus on business logic.
The entire OS is a single pure function that provides application developers with strong guarantees: automated persistence and memory management, repeatable builds, and support for hot code reloading.
You can get started learning how to contribute to the project, or view a variety of libraries for building on Urbit using the languages you already know.