His goal in life, however, is a frankly progressive one: by making information freer, he hopes to make the world fairer, kinder, and nicer.
Paradoxically, that third-rate burglary, as President Nixon called it, and the ensuing cover-up, also made information free.
A programmer who helped create RSS, Mr. Swartz was also a charismatic leader in the movement to make information free online.
Wales's most radical contribution may be not to have made information free but — in his own alma-matricidal way — to have invented a system that does not favor the Ph.D. over the well-read fifteen-year-old.
It touts the advantages of society publishing practices and commits signers to making information as free as possible, "depending on each publisher's business and publishing requirements".
Sixteen months ago, the US Drug Enforcement Administration made information of "potential operations to free Guzman" known to Mexican authorities, according to an unnamed DEA official who spoke to the Associated Press.
Because the same free flow that makes information cheap and reproducible helps us treasure the sight of information that is not.
In addition, its semistructured text for protein annotation makes information extraction more reliable than those from free text.
He may now travel the world giving speeches and even include Bono as a friend, but Wales's celebrity relies largely on being the guy who made the sum of the world's information free without making a penny himself.
