What happened is that SGI dropped it and then it got passed around like between one company after another while it consistently lost more and more market share to ARM.

Until MIPS was mostly irrelevant as an arch.

So eventually the company realized that trying to only build on MIPS was not gone work, so they Open-Sourced MIPS itself and they are trying to use their knowledge to be part of the RISC-V ecosystem.

But since they were late to that game as well, I am skeptical.