They aren't doing this as a money making exercise. It's a way for them to get the MIPS architecture out in the open and have the next generation of engineers get familiar with it. I think the licensing is just a way for them to protect access to what is still monetisable IP while still making it available for teaching purposes.
> It's a way for them to get the MIPS architecture out in the open.
Most computer architecture courses of the last 25 years have already been based on MIPS (or any MIPS-like or -light adapted version for the course). That's because the MIPS ISA is simple, regular and elegant, and the original MIPS is a pipeline simple enough to be taught easily and nevertheless able to present most important problems and solutions that a CPU and a pipelined CPU may encounter.
