Aaron Swartz

Aaron Swartz was in a relationship with Australian-American progressive activist Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman until his death. On the evening of January 11, 2013, Stinebrickner-Kauffman discovered his body in his Brooklyn apartment. A spokeswoman for New York's Medical Examiner later told the reporters that Swartz had killed himself by hanging. There was no suicide note

His family and Stinebrickner-Kauffman set up a memorial website where they eulogize him with the following statement, “He used his prodigious skills as a programmer and technologist not to enrich himself but to make the Internet and the world a fairer, better place”.

Following his death, Swartz has been hailed as “an online icon” and his trial as an act of overzealous and selective prosecution. Several documentaries have been made on his life, including the 2014 release, ‘Killswitch’. A biographical film, titled ‘Patriot of the Web’, is set for a late 2018 release on Amazon.

Aaron Swartz was born on November 8, 1986, in Highland Park, a suburb of Chicago, Illinois, to Susan and Robert Swartz. He had two brothers, Noah and Benjamin. Both his parents are Jewish. His father is an entrepreneur himself and established Mark Williams Company, a Chicago-based software company.

Swartz was a gifted child and demonstrated his immense potential at an early age. He spent most of his time learning about computers, programming, the internet, and internet culture.

He studied at North Shore Country Day School, a small private school near Chicago, until he was in the 9th grade. In the following year, he left high school and began doing several computer-related courses in the Chicago area.

Swartz earned the ArsDigita Prize at the age of 13. The award used to be given to young people who set up "useful, educational, and collaborative" non-commercial websites. In the following year, he joined the working group that produced RSS 1.0 web syndication specification in December 2000.

After getting accepted into Stanford University, Swartz sought to work on Y Combinator's very first Summer Founders Program, a start-up called Infogami that would be built as a flexible content management system to design rich and visually interesting websites or a type of wiki for structured data. Swartz collaborated with Infogami co-founder Simon Carstensen over the course of the summer of 2005.

During this period, he started blogging actively. His writings covered a wide range of topics, including his experiences at Stanford, his role in creating Creative Commons, and copyright law.

He decided not to return to Stanford in 2006 and continued his work at Infogami. During his tenure in the company, he created web.py, a web application framework for Python as he had become dissatisfied with other Python programming language-based systems.

In early fall 2005, he joined the founders of Reddit, another nascent Y-Combinator firm, to help them author their Lisp codebase using Python and web.py. Despite Infogami being abandoned after the acquisition of Not a Bug by Condé Nast Publications, the owner of Wired magazine, its software was applied to run the Internet Archive's Open Library project.

In November 2005, Infogami was merged with Reddit, a decision that came after the former failed to secure further funding. That year, Not a Bug was established and it promoted both products. While they started off on equal footing with both projects having trouble, Reddit soon became more popular.

In 2001, Swartz worked for the RDFCore working group at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and wrote the RFC 3870, Application/RDF+XML Media Type Registration. The document contains the description of a new type of media, "RDF/XML", produced to run the Semantic Web.

As one of the major contributors to Markdown, a lightweight markup language with plain text formatting syntax, produced to be easily converted to HTML and similar formats by using a tool of the same name, Swartz was the writer of Markdown’s html2text translator. In 2002, Swartz came up with atx language, which he used to write Markdown’s syntax.

It was revealed only after his death that Swartz had obtained the Library of Congress's complete bibliographic dataset sometime around 2006. While people generally had to pay fees to access the data, copyright laws did not withhold it within the US as it was a government document. Swartz subsequently put the data up on Open Library, effectively making it available to everyone for free.

It was later approved by the Copyright Office. According to some sources, the file came to the internet archive from Plymouth State University's library system, Scriblio. Despite this, Swartz’s file became the foundation of Open Library.

He collaborated with Virgil Griffith to produce Tor2web, which is an HTTP proxy for Tor-hidden services. It serves as a link between Tor and basic web browsers.