Aaron Hillel Swartz was an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, writer, political organizer, and Internet hacktivist. He was involved in the development of the web feed format RSS, the Markdown publishing format, the organization Creative Commons, and the website framework web py. Swartz founded the online group Demand Progress, known for its campaign against the Stop Online Piracy Act. In 2011, he was arrested by Massachusetts Institute of Technology police on state breaking-and-entering charges. Two days after the prosecution rejected a counter-offer by Swartz, he found dead in his Brooklyn apartment, where he had committed suicide.
About Aaron Swartz in brief
Aaron Hillel Swartz was an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, writer, political organizer, and Internet hacktivist. He was involved in the development of the web feed format RSS, the Markdown publishing format, the organization Creative Commons, and the website framework web. py. Swartz founded the online group Demand Progress, known for its campaign against the Stop Online Piracy Act. In 2011, he was arrested by Massachusetts Institute of Technology police on state breaking-and-entering charges. He declined a plea bargain under which he would have served six months in federal prison. Two days after the prosecution rejected a counter-offer by Swartz, he found dead in his Brooklyn apartment, where he had committed suicide. In 2013, Swartz was inducted posthumously into the Internet Hall of Fame. He is the eldest son of Jewish parents Susan and Robert Swartz. His father had founded the software firm Mark Williams Company. He attended North Shore Country Day School, a small private school near Chicago, until 9th grade. He left high school in the 10th grade, and enrolled in courses at Lake Forest College. In 1999, when he was 13 years old he created the website Theinfo. org, a collaborative online library. He won the ArsDigita Prize, given to young people who create \”useful, educational, and collaborative\” noncommercial websites. In 2010, he became a research fellow at Harvard University’s Safra Research Lab on Institutional Corruption, directed by Lawrence Lessig.
He dropped out of Stanford University after his first year to work on a startup called Infogami, designed as a flexible content management system to allow the creation of rich and visually interesting websites or a form of wiki for structured data. In early fall of 2005, he worked with his fellow co-founders of another nascent Y-Combinator firm Reddit, to rewrite Reddit’s Lisp codebase using Python and web py. As a result of this merger, Aaron was given the title of co-founder of Reddit. In October 2006, Not a Bug was acquired by Condé Nast Publications, owner of Wired magazine. In September 2007, he left the company to launch a new firm, Jottit, in another attempt to create another markdown driven content management systems in Python. He ultimately left the firm in September 2008, and found life uncongenial, and he ultimately found himself working on work on Wired magazine instead. In 2009, he helped launch the Progressive Change Campaign Committee in 2009 to learn more about effective online activism. He died in a car crash in New York City on February 14, 2011. He had been charged with two counts of wire fraud and eleven violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, carrying a cumulative maximum penalty of USD 1 million in fines, 35 years in prison, asset forfeiture, restitution, and supervised release. He also worked on the Internet Archive’s Open Library project and the web. Py web framework was used as basis for many other projects by many others.
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This page is based on the article Aaron Swartz published in Wikipedia (as of Jan. 04, 2021) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
