Aaron H. Swartz: A Tribute To His Legacy
On Friday, January 11, Aaron H. Swartz was found dead in his apartment in New York City after allegedly hanging himself, according to a Washington Post report.
But who was Aaron Swartz and why many people, especially a lot of netizens are now mourning for his death?
Swartz was born in Chicago, Illinois on November 8, 1986. He attended North Shore Country Day School in Winnetka, Illinois. When he was 13, he was the winner of ArsDigita prize, an innovative competition for young people who created "useful, educational, and collaborative" non-commercial websites. He later attended Stanford University, but left the school after just one year. He was also a member of Harvard University Center for Ethics in 2010.
Swartz was an American computer programmer, writer, archivist, political organizer, and Internet activist. He was credited for co-authoring the "RSS 1.0" specification of RSS, and built the Web site framework web.py and the architecture for the Open Library. He also co-founded the online group Demand Progress — known for its campaign against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).
Swartz was also attributed as the founder of Infogami and the co-founder of Reddit. He co-launched Jottit in 1977. He also worked with U.S. and international activist groups Rootstrikers and Avaaz. His website is aaronsw.com.
Meanwhile, according to another report from Techcrunch.com, Swartz death also caught the attention of the group Anonymous who have shown a deep sympathy for his death by allegedly hacking the MIT website.
Here are some excerpts of their message, as reported by Techcrunch:
"Whether or not the government contributed to his suicide, the government's prosecution of Swartz was a grotesque miscarriage of justice, a distorted and perverse shadow of the justice that Aaron died fighting for — freeing the publicly-funded scientific literature from a publishing system that makes it inaccessible to most of those who paid for it — enabling the collective betterment of the world through the facilitation of sharing — an ideal that we should all support."
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