It takes quite some big brass b^H^H^H^H^H^H^H PR skills to downplay Lexra disaster that (together with market crash and other events around year 2000) costed MIPS itself quite dearly in both money directly and more importantly in market position. Need I remind you that was right around the time of ARM's spectacular rise: Quite literally MIPS Technologies being too busy with this litigation is the only good explanation why it was blind to the real threat: ARM7TDMI taking embedded/telecom market by storm. Only burgeoning xDSL market (and good availability of established binary-only MIPS codebase for it) that saved MIPS in early 2000s.

Not to mention quite egregious fact-twisting I see in your reply on two counts: First, that wasn't really a "patent infringement" - first lawsuit was about trademark infringement - which Lexra arguably was guilty of, but quickly backpedaled, at which point case felt apart. Then MIPS, unhappy with that outcome, launched second, even bigger lawsuit that was technically about patent infringement, but Lexra never actually used the patent in question, and specifically marketed their design as free from lwl/r and swl/r instructions, making the whole thing a theater of absurd going on for years where plaintiff was alleging that Lexra was was yes, not implenting those instructions, but somehow facilitating their clients' emulating those. Hardly that can be called "ended up in court". Whopsie-daisy... "ended up", right...

Providing official Verilog code for an older MIPS core is certainly a massive feat and deserve an applause, but then again there are plenty of other HDL implementations of CPU cores around, MIPS ISA cores included [0]. And patent law have a safe haven for academia [1], so "completely open and free for university use" is just hot air, sorry. Still, it's "official", so there's value in that, of course.

[0] http://opencores.org/project,ion [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_exemption