As a programmer, Swartz helped develop the web feed format RSS ; [ 1 ] the technical architecture for Creative Commons , an organization dedicated to creating copyright licenses; [ 1 ] the Python website framework web. Swartz was involved in the development of the social news aggregation website Reddit until he departed from the company in On January 6, , Swartz was arrested by Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT police on state breaking-and-entering charges, after connecting a computer to the MIT network in an unmarked and unlocked closet and setting it to download academic journal articles systematically from JSTOR using a guest user account issued to him by MIT.
Aaron Hillel Swartz [ 22 ] was born in Highland Park , 25 miles 40 kilometers north of Chicago , [ 23 ] [ 24 ] to a Jewish family. At an early age, Swartz immersed himself in the study of computers, programming, the Internet, and Internet culture. In , at age 12, he created the website The Info Network, a user-generated encyclopedia.
During Swartz's first year at Stanford, he applied to Y Combinator 's first Summer Founders Program, proposing to work on a startup called Infogami, a flexible content management system designed to create rich and visually interesting websites [ 37 ] or a form of wiki for structured data.
After working on it with co-founder Simon Carstensen over the summer of , Swartz opted not to return to Stanford, choosing instead to continue to develop and seek funding for Infogami. As part of his work on Infogami, Swartz created the web. In the early fall of , he worked with his fellow co-founders of another nascent Y-Combinator firm, Reddit , to rewrite its Lisp codebase using Python and web.
Although Infogami's platform was abandoned after Not a Bug was acquired, Infogami's software was used to support the Internet Archive 's Open Library project and the web. When Infogami failed to find further funding, Y-Combinator organizers suggested Infogami merge with Reddit, [ 39 ] [ 40 ] which it did in November , creating a new firm, Not a Bug, devoted to promoting both products.
