This is what I left most curious about. There is no mention of compensation that I see - were they eventually appropriately compensated?

It seems strange for them to leave out this detail - but perhaps not since money was clearly not part of their motivations.

This is one of the questions asked at the end of the Google Tech talk video. The author responds that they licensed it to apple for a nominal fee. He also says that he got paid pretty well as a contractor for apple so didn't feel bad not getting paid for a few months. He also apparently still works full time on this program and spoke passionately about upgrading it to take advantage of GPUs.