Reprinted from TidBITS by permission; reuse governed by Creative Commons
license BY-NC-ND 3.0. TidBITS has offered years of thoughtful commentary
on Apple and Internet topics. For free email subscriptions and access to the
entire TidBITS archive, visit http://www.tidbits.com/


   Aaron Swartz, Who Helped Free Information, Is Dead

   Glenn Fleishman

   The coder, activist, and open-access advocate [1]Aaron Swartz died 11
   January 2013 by his own hand. From the age of 13, when he [2]won a
   prize given to youth who created non-commercial Web sites that were
   'useful, educational, and collaborative,' Swartz dedicated his life to
   writing code and sites that allowed information to flow more freely and
   advocating successfully against efforts to restrict access.

   Swartz provided the code and technical underpinnings for [3]Creative
   Commons at its formation, joined the founders of [4]Reddit early on and
   created the software to run it in its early days (which he later
   released into the public domain), built [5]Open Library with the
   [6]Internet Archive, and founded [7]Demand Progress, one of the groups
   instrumental in rallying support against SOPA and PIPA copyright
   legislation. Swartz also worked on [8]RSS 1.0 (not the original RSS
   developed by Netscape and adapted and popularized by Dave Winer that
   resulted in RSS 2.0), which led him to help put together the
   [9]Resource Description Framework (RDF) specification at the [10]World
   Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

   More recently, Swartz became a vociferous advocate of freeing
   information from behind paywalls that was outside copyright protection
   or that he thought should be outside such protection, including court
   records and, more controversially, academic articles. His latter effort
   led to federal computer crime charges that were unresolved at his
   death. A trial was slated for April 2013, and could have led to years
   in prison.

   Swartz is remembered not just for each of these and many other projects
   he was involved with, even though most have significance in the
   evolution of the Internet. On top of his contributions to the public
   good, he will also be remembered for his early genius, his keen
   insight, his warmth, and his generosity. BoingBoing has [11]assembled
   an ongoing collection of tributes to and articles about Swartz,
   [12]including a remembrance by one of its editors, Cory Doctorow, who
   was one of Swartz's friends.

References

   1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
   2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArsDigita_Prize
   3. http://creativecommons.org/
   4. http://www.reddit.com/
   5. http://openlibrary.org/
   6. http://archive.org/
   7. http://demandprogress.org/
   8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS
   9. http://www.w3.org/RDF/
  10. http://www.w3.org/
  11. http://boingboing.net/tag/aaronsw
  12. http://boingboing.net/2013/01/12/rip-aaron-swartz.html

.