Aaron Swartz Would’ve Been 40 Today. His ‘Legacy Lives On’ Says FSF

November 8, 2026

“Aaron Swartz would have turned forty this year,” writes FSF deputy director Sean O’Brien. “November 8 is Aaron Swartz Day, when we remember a pioneer of free software and information sharing whose contributions helped shape the modern internet.”

The Internet Archive will host a hackathon Sunday in San Francisco celebrating Aaron’s Swartz’s life “and the projects he worked on, many of which are still going strong today,” including SecureDrop, OpenLibrary, and Creative Commons. “We are also spreading the word about projects he inspired,” including OnionPress and the EFF’s Atlas of Surveillancedocumenting police tech use through open source research, now a collaborative effort with volunteers, the University of Nevada, Reno, and the Reynolds School of Journalism. The event is also supported by Free Law Project, and organizers are asking attendees to “bring a color print out of your favorite photos of Aaron for a huge collaborative collage.”

From the Internet Archive’s blog:

Aaron was also a co-founder of Creative Commons, where he worked with Lisa Rein developing the RSS-enhanced HTML code that sits behind Creative Commons licenses, much of which is still in use today. The “Quantifying the Commons” project was designed to help measure open-licensed and public-domain works worldwide, and is one of the projects participants can work on. Aaron loved Tor and created tools such as “Tor2web” (with Virgil Griffith) to help more people publish Tor-accessible websites. Onion Press is a Tor-based publishing system designed for decentralized, censorship-resistant publishing, and participants can work on the code base…

We also encourage you to have a hackathon in your own town using our materials — or materials of your own. Please let us know if you plan to do this (although it’s not required!). If you do let us know, we can include you on our website and help you spread the word about your event. So far, there is an event in Portland sponsored by Portland Civic Lab where they will be screening The Internet’s Own Boy and celebrating Aaron’s life.

“EFF was proud to call Aaron a friend and ally,” the digital rights organization posted this week. And the FSF’s deputy director writes “It is particularly striking that some of the world’s largest companies now rely on technology Swartz helped to develop.”

One of Swartz’s most important technical contributions was his collaboration with John Gruber on Markdown, the simple text formatting system introduced in 2004. Markdown allows users to create structured documents using ordinary text, without requiring proprietary software. More than twenty years later, Markdown has become one of the most popular formats for documentation and publishing, and is widely used in community websites such as forums and wikis. This is not a minor contribution. Companies developing LLMs use Markdown extensively in their products and development tools. OpenAI, for example, recommends Markdown for organizing instructions and communicating structure to its ChatGPT models… Swartz also developed web.py, a public domain framework for building Python applications, and contributed to RSS 1.0, a public internet standard for distributing news and other information between websites.

Swartz developed web.py while rewriting the software running Reddit after Reddit acquired Swartz’s company Infogami.

Reddit recently licensed its content to AI companies, and the FSF’s deputy director notes “the enormous scale of the alleged ‘piracy’ by giant technology corporations” while Aaron himself had “faced criminal prosecution for downloading academic research that he wanted to distribute with no monetary gain.”

In 2011, federal prosecutors charged Swartz with computer fraud and related offenses after he downloaded millions of academic articles from the JSTOR collection through MIT’s university network… Although he was not charged with copyright infringement, he faced aggressive federal prosecution and the possibility of decades in prison before he tragically died by suicide in January 2013, at just twenty-six years old…

Swartz helped build tools that made the internet more useful and accessible, and his contributions continue to shape a world he never lived to see. On Aaron Swartz Day, we should remember his achievements and the access-to-knowledge principles that guided them. The companies benefiting from his legacy should respect those same principles by giving users true freedom and control, rather than imposing more restrictions on us all.