Why We Should Remember Aaron Swartz - Businessweek - 0 views
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When he was barely a teenager, Aaron Swartz began playing with XML, an Internet language like Sanskrit or classical Greek–flexible, elegant and capable of great complexity. XML is most often used to move large amounts of information, entire databases, among computers. You open XML by introducing new terms and defining what they’ll do, nesting new definitions inside of the ones you’ve already created. Of this, Swartz created a kind of pidgin, a simple set of definitions called RSS.
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When he was barely a teenager, Aaron Swartz began playing with XML, an Internet language like Sanskrit or classical Greek–flexible, elegant and capable of great complexity. XML is most often used to move large amounts of information, entire databases, among computers. You open XML by introducing new terms and defining what they’ll do, nesting new definitions inside of the ones you’ve already created. Of this, Swartz created a kind of pidgin, a simple set of definitions called RSS.
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This is the tension at the heart of the Internet: whether to own or to make. You can own a site or a program–iTunes, Microsoft (MSFT) Word, Facebook (FB), Twitter–but you cannot own a language. Yet the languages, written for beauty and utility, make sites and programs useful and possible. You make the Internet work by making languages universal and free; you make money from the Internet by closing off bits of it and charging to get in. There’s certainly nothing wrong with making money, but without the innovations of complicated, brilliant people like Swartz, no one would be making any money at all.
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