Aaron Swartz would have turned 40 today. His 'legacy lives on' says FSF

The Free Software Foundation uses Aaron Swartz’s fortieth birthday to highlight the enduring reach of his work and the unequal treatment of efforts to make knowledge accessible. Swartz helped create Markdown, contributed to RSS, and developed the public-domain Python framework web.py; these tools and standards still support publishing, software development, and services used across the technology industry. His belief that research should be freely available led to his prosecution after he downloaded millions of JSTOR papers through MIT’s network. He faced the prospect of decades in prison and died by suicide in 2013, aged twenty-six.

The argument is that large technology companies now profit from the same openness Swartz championed, while using vast collections of human knowledge to build proprietary AI systems and restricting users’ control. Reddit, which Swartz co-owned after his startup merged with it, has licensed user-generated content to Google and OpenAI. Meanwhile, Anthropic settled for $1.5 billion over claims involving millions of unauthorized book copies, and Meta faces publishers’ allegations about large-scale copying of books and academic papers. These cases differ legally from Swartz’s, but the contrast between his prosecution and corporate data collection is stark. The FSF concludes that companies benefiting from free software, public knowledge, and open standards should honor their principles by giving users greater freedom and control.