RSS developer and Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment in New York. Swart'z body was found friday evening in Brooklyn, Swartz age only 26 years old, When he was a 14 years old he helped to create RSS standard. Aaron was a good coder and hacker. Swartz also focused on sociology, civic awareness and activism.
He was also an activist so Swartz explain about 'How we stopped Sopa' as below
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In 2010 he was a member of the Harvard University Center for Ethics. He co founded the online group Demand Progress (which recently voiced its support for Richard O'Dwyer) and later worked with US and international activist groups Rootstrikers and Avaaz.
On January 6, 2011, Swartz was arrested in connection with systematic downloading of academic journal articles from JSTOR, which became the subject of a federal investigation
He wrote on his Blog
"When I first started at Reddit, growth was slow. The site was put online very early within weeks of starting work on it -- but for the first three months it hardly got above three thousand visitors a day, which is about baseline for a useful RSS feed. Then, in a couple weeks of marathon coding sessions, we moved the site from Lisp to Python and I wrote an article about it for my blog. It got a lot of attention -- Hell hath no fury like a Lisp fan scorned -- and even today I still run into people at parties who, when I mention that I worked at Reddit, say "Oh, the site that switched from Lisp."
According to NBC News
Swartz’s family described him as entirely committed to social justice. He helped to defeat an Internet censorship bill and “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.”
Official Statement From his Family And Partner:
"Our beloved brother, son, friend, and partner Aaron Swartz hanged himself on Friday in his Brooklyn apartment. We are in shock, and have not yet come to terms with his passing.
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. We’re grateful for our time with him, to those who loved him and stood with him, and to all of those who continue his work for a better world.
Aaron’s commitment to social justice was profound, and defined his life. He was instrumental to the defeat of an Internet censorship bill; he fought for a more democratic, open, and accountable political system; and he helped to create, build, and preserve a dizzying range of scholarly projects that extended the scope and accessibility of human knowledge. 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. His deeply humane writing touched minds and hearts across generations and continents. He earned the friendship of thousands and the respect and support of millions more.
Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorney’s office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community’s most cherished principles.
Today, we grieve for the extraordinary and irreplaceable man that we have lost"
Source: VB
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