An innovator, computer freedom activist and the co-developer of RSS and Reddit, Aaron Swartz has died at 26. A relentless online campaigner who fought to make online content free to the public, Swartz took his life in his Brooklyn apartment Friday, his family said in a statement.
A computer prodigy, Swartz was accused of stealing millions of journal articles from an electronic archive named JSTOR from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which he intended to release free to the public. He was indicted in July 2011 by a federal grand jury on charges including wire fraud and computer fraud, which would invite potential penalties of up to 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines if convicted. Swartz was scheduled to go to trial next month and according to his family, the prospect of trial was too much for him. Swartz had earlier written of his history of depression in his blog.
At 13, he created his first Web application, an online encyclopedia that operated much like Wikipedia, The New York Times reported. Swartz co-authored the software behind RSS feeds at the age of 14. Later, he moved to Cambridge, where he began working on a project which gradually turned into the now-famous social news website Reddit. All his works, including RSS that distributes content over the Internet and Reddit which utilizes the intellect of the readers to submit and rank news and other online content, had his signature touch of what he defines as social justice.
"Aaron's insatiable curiosity, creativity, and brilliance; his reflexive empathy and capacity for selfless, boundless love; his refusal to accept injustice as inevitable-these gifts made the world, and our lives, far brighter," his family said in a statement. "Aaron's commitment to social justice was profound, and defined his life. 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."
Swartz was a strong advocate and a firm believer of the principle that information which can benefit the society should be made available for free. He wrote a computer program to download nearly 20 million pages of legal documents from the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) system. The system charged 10 cents per page for access and Swartz, together with other Internet activists, made these documents available to the public for free.
He was a hero for his efforts to "liberate" information from JSTOR and PACER. Swartz was, in fact, a legend for Internet activists after his organization Demand Progress played a key role in forcing the government to withdraw the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which sought to restrict access to websites that illegally shared copyrighted property.
