Sad news from the campus newspaper of my alma mater:
Computer activist Aaron H. Swartz committed suicide in New York City yesterday, Jan. 11, according to his uncle, Michael Wolf, in a comment to The Tech. Swartz was 26.
…
The accomplished Swartz co-authored the now widely-used RSS 1.0 specification at age 14, founded Infogami which later merged with the popular social news site reddit, and completed a fellowship at Harvard’s Ethics Center Lab on Institutional Corruption. In 2010, he founded DemandProgress.org, a “campaign against the Internet censorship bills SOPA/PIPA.”
I didn’t know Swartz, but knew of him, from his precocious emergence as a teen in Chicago (when I lived there) to his various Web, Internet, and political activities. He was of that ultra-principled, uber-nerd ilk reminiscent of Richard Stallman, Philip Greenspun, Olin Shivers, Eric Raymond, and Mark Pilgrim. It’s one thing to be able to hack, but quite another to be able to translate that focus into the public sphere.
We should all be so lucky to have done as much as he did in the time that we have been given.