Comment by bawolff

I guess it depends on what you think the goal of the essay was. I always felt like the primary goal was to inspire people and a lot of the software engineering parts were more framing. To me it reads as a manifesto disguised as a software engineering essay.

If you take the goal as inspiring people, i think it achieved its goals and then some. I'm pretty sure that CATB brought more people into FOSS than the GNU manifesto ever did.