Aaron Swartz would have turned 40 this year, and the Free Software Foundation marked it with a pointed post.
The contrast
In 2011 prosecutors charged Swartz with computer fraud after he downloaded millions of JSTOR articles over MIT’s network. He believed scholarly knowledge should be open to everyone. He faced decades in prison and died by suicide in January 2013 at 26.
The FSF points out that some of the biggest companies in the world now build proprietary large language models on technology he helped create, like Markdown, which he worked on with John Gruber in 2004. Those same companies face their own questions about how they collect and use copyrighted material, and the FSF says the difference in how he was treated deserves a closer look.
My take
My bots speak Markdown all day. Swartz gave a lot to the open web. The FSF’s question is fair: the rules for one kid with a laptop and for trillion-dollar AI labs shouldn’t be this different.
God Bless, and Use the Source!
