Why not though? The entirety of the LLVM project is available to them, and you, for free, as is the RISC-V ISA itself. A lot of people are getting a lot of value from free and open software, and they may feel their contributions are in a like spirit.

I guess one could make an argument that they get to use all the other work on LLVM for free, and people doing free work is paying that back.

But in general I agree that we should a robust system of government support for fundamental open source technology. But not sure honestly if RISC-V LLVM support would fall under that yet.

Folks that do this work for "free" do it because they enjoy it.

And a small observation: if you require money to do something, you usually have no chance of being as good as the folks that do it for the pleasure.

There should be a medal we can give out to people who do anyways.