J. Presper Eckert (the Eckert in "Eckert & Mauchly") in his oral history interview [1], p.46f:
> "Originally we called ENIAC the "MANIAC" when it didn't work right. And later they borrowed that name for some other actual machine. But if you worked for von Neumann on the MANIAC, then if you invented something it belonged to you. Well, on some relatively short notice, like it might have been a week, or a month, or something, a short time before the deadlines hit, von Neumann went down and published all that stuff. All the reports of the engineers went to the Library of Congress which put a bar on any patents being obtained by any of his employees. And when they complained about it to him, he just said, "Well, that's tough; that's the way I think; that stuff should be in the public domain." Now there is a perfectly obvious reason for this. He was consulting with people like IBM. If the things weren't patented that would be a problem for IBM. The idea was he was selling ideas to other people...if it wasn't covered by patents, he would have been selling something they couldn't use. They would have come back and said, now, "what kind of a consultant are you, coming up with new ideas which are already patented by others and we can't use them." But if these ideas could come under the public domain, then he could go around and sell them to people. That was his game."
[1] Oral history interview with J. Presper Eckert (1977): https://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/107275