In an ironic twist,
Richard M. Stallman now sits in the William H.
Gates Tower of the Ray and Maria
Stata Center at
MIT in
Cambridge, Massachusetts. His former offices at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science (
LCS, known as
Project MAC in the olden days) have now been moved to the new
Stata Center after
LCS and the MIT
AI Lab merged to become the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (
CSAIL).
The Stata Center has two towers, the Dreyfuss and the Gates. In recent email communications within CSAIL, RMS was heard requesting that lab residents refer to their offices as Stata-G716 instead of Gates 716. According to him, CSAIL is not beholden to Bill Gates despite his massive contribution to the Stata Center. In fact, RMS suggests that lab members remind themselves daily of the injustices perpetrated by this modern-day robber baron, by engaging in activities like showing the finger to any statues and plaques of Bill, similar to practices followed at Stanford University, which also has a Gates-sponsored computer science building. He also suggested putting up posters depicting Gates handing out cigarette packet-like objects with the Windows logo emblazoned on them to children. The poster would also express Gates' hope that the children would be hooked on his cancerous product by the time they grew up.
The Gates tower is the more easterly of The Two Towers. RMS has also reacted positively to calling the Gates Tower Barad-dur after its Tolkienian counterpart, because it is associated with a greater evil.
Note on Sources: It is easily verifiable through the public Internet that CSAIL is now located in the Gates tower of the Stata Center. It is also easily verifiable that RMS's offices are located within CSAIL.
RMS's suggestions above were made on an CSAIL mailing list, the archives of which are available only to list members. I am unable to post links to any public archive of this discussion.