I'm not sure they'd make as much as owning the network end to end. Vertical integration is hot right now, see Apple. Uber already has delivery via freight as well as getting into air delivery, so why would they need to license it? It just makes more sense to keep the tech proprietary and use it for their various enterprises.
It's tough to say, I think profitability would come faster than being a taxi company with an app (disregarding freight and air for now). But I think there is a much wider prospective customer base and recurring revenue licensing the tech stack as a SaaS. And that's not to say they have to give up Uber as a taxi company while they do both. It's a much more reasonable moonshot than the autonomous driving experiment they did that killed someone moving fast and breaking things. I see a lot of value there.
