From Reddit to Creative Commons: Swartz's legacy
Posted: Thu Feb 13, 2025 5:49 am
A spirit similar to that which led Steve Jobs, along with Wozniak (both founding partners of Apple) to begin their career as entrepreneurs, giving birth to one of the most important companies in the current economy. With the flow of the first millions, Apple was seen to mutate into a greedy machine for generating millions. This is the reason, among others, why Wozniak chose other paths than Jobs, moving away from Apple. Bill Gates, another genius of the time, also traveled these paths of sharing, then abandoned them, like Jobs, to finally take them up again, although in another format, with his immense philanthropic work.
Returning to Swartz, we know that he was the austria mobile database son of a computer company executive. Like Jobs (Reed College) and Gates (Harvard), he dropped out of university, in this case Stanford, but before that he had already dropped out of school, becoming a true autodidact. He fed on information, preferred philosophy and was a prodigious reader. Between the ages of 12 and 13 he created theinfo.org, something like a Wikipedia before Wikipedia, from which he proposed to share all knowledge on a single website. At 14, also according to The Economist, he was already working with Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web, with whom he helped develop the Semantic Web with the aim of improving the possibilities of sharing information. He was co-author of the RSS 1.0 specifications. Also, in the midst of his struggles of principles, he had time to create some commercial success. Thus was born Reddit, a sharing platform that elevated him to the pedestal of commercial success creators when it was sold to Condé Nast. He founded Creative Commons, which allowed him to simplify copyright licenses so much that this photo of him could be obtained from that site.
Aaron Swartzman - MD Digital Marketing
Jacob Appelbaum, CC BY-SA
Swartz was much more than a talented programmer: he was a visionary who, from an early age, made his mark on the digital world.
Returning to Swartz, we know that he was the austria mobile database son of a computer company executive. Like Jobs (Reed College) and Gates (Harvard), he dropped out of university, in this case Stanford, but before that he had already dropped out of school, becoming a true autodidact. He fed on information, preferred philosophy and was a prodigious reader. Between the ages of 12 and 13 he created theinfo.org, something like a Wikipedia before Wikipedia, from which he proposed to share all knowledge on a single website. At 14, also according to The Economist, he was already working with Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web, with whom he helped develop the Semantic Web with the aim of improving the possibilities of sharing information. He was co-author of the RSS 1.0 specifications. Also, in the midst of his struggles of principles, he had time to create some commercial success. Thus was born Reddit, a sharing platform that elevated him to the pedestal of commercial success creators when it was sold to Condé Nast. He founded Creative Commons, which allowed him to simplify copyright licenses so much that this photo of him could be obtained from that site.
Aaron Swartzman - MD Digital Marketing
Jacob Appelbaum, CC BY-SA
Swartz was much more than a talented programmer: he was a visionary who, from an early age, made his mark on the digital world.