For the humanity, the publication of the von Neumann report was certainly a very positive thing because it launched a large number of research projects with the purpose of building electronic computers, both in USA and in many other countries.
There is absolutely no doubt that without this publication and with a patent claiming the design of a computer with stored program, the evolution of the computers would have been much slower.
Whoever pushed the report to be published did a huge service to everybody else but Eckert and Mauchly.
Also, Eckert and his coworkers were deluded if they thought they could have gained anything by having a patent on the stored-program computer.
Nobody prevented them to build good computers even without a patent, but they did not have the intellectual and financial resources to do much until they were bought by Remington Rand, which lead to the introduction of UNIVAC in 1951.
If they had a patent, the result would have been that Remington Rand would have had a monopoly on the computer market, with inferior products, and all the great advances in computers that have been done in other places, like NIST, MIT or IBM, would have happened only many years later.
I have read both the von Neumann report, which is a model of clarity, and all the early documents that remain from Eckert, Mauchly et al.
It is likely that they already had some ideas about stored-program computers, but there is no doubt that their ideas were very confused.
Von Neumann distinguished what was right from what was wrong in their ideas, then clarified, organized and completed all those concepts and synthesized them in a coherent theory that could be easily understood and used by anyone else.
The contribution of von Neumann is much more important than Eckert tries to imply.
Moreover, while Eckert and al. were upset that their own contributions were not acknowledged as well as they should have been, they also failed to acknowledge the important ideas about electronic computers that they themselves have taken from Atanasoff, without ever mentioning him.
Unlike Eckert and al., but like von Neumann, Atanasoff was also someone able to express very clearly his concepts, so you could easily learn from him. For example a report about the classification of computer memories, written by Atanasoff at the beginning of WWII, was extremely advanced for those days (Atanasoff invented what is now called DRAM).