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My take on this issue is pretty simple: defense contractors are endangering their long-term financial health in order to gain a few hundred thousand dollars (at most) in "royalties."

The issue is simple: these companies have used the public domain nature of their work as their primary defense against lawsuits for damage caused by their products. I can think of several notorious issues off the top of my head:

The Bell H-1's unfortunate tendency to shed its main rotor in certain flight regimes
The Boeing H-46's unfortunate tendency to shed its aft rotor (and engines) in certain flight regimes
The MV-22's unfortunate safety record
The AV-8A's unfortunate tendency to flip over in a hover
The engine problems in the F-14 and F/A-18

In each of these cases, the courts agreed with the contractor's arguments that the product was built for the military, to the military's specifications, and that the proper defendant was the military. This saved the contractors billions of dollars of liability.

Now, they're VOLUNTARILY casting aside that defense. It will be cited in any future cases as "admission against interest," and open the door to any number of lawsuits when someone's house winds up stopping (or at least slowing down) a military aircraft.