Aaron Hillel Swartz

Early life: Born in Highland Park, north of Chicago, the child of a Jewish family. He was the eldest child of Susan and Robert Swartz and brother to Noah and Ben Swartz. He was an atheist. At an early age, Swartz immersed himself in the study of computers, programming.
In 2000, at the age of 14, he co-authored RSS version 1.0, and shortly thereafter joined a working group at the World Wide Web Consortium to help develop common data formats used on the World Wide Web.

Entrepreneurship: During his 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 or a form of wiki for structured data. After working on it with co-founder Simon Carstensen over the summer of 2005, Swartz opted not to return to Stanford, choosing instead to continue to develop and seek funding for Infogami.

When Infogami failed to find further funding, Y-Combinator organizers suggested Infogami merge with Reddit, which it did in November 2005, creating a new firm, Not a Bug, devoted to promoting both products. As a result, Swartz was given the title of co-founder of Reddit.

In October 2006, based largely on Reddit's success, Not a Bug was acquired by Condé Nast Publications, owner of Wired magazine. Swartz moved with his company to San Francisco to continue to work on Reddit for Wired. He found corporate office life uncongenial and ultimately was asked to resign from the company.

Swartz was one of the early architects of Creative Commons and a developer of the Internet Archives Open Library, a free book database and digital library open to the public.

Activism: He founded software company Infogami, and when it merged with online news site Reddit, he became a co-owner. There, Swartz released as free software the web framework he developed, web.py.