|
Subject: Proposal for government mode Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.devel Date: 2006-04-01 08:41:53 GMT (2 years, 28 weeks, 2 days, 7 hours and 56 minutes ago) Dear Emacs Developers, Let me introduce myself -- I am the Bulgarian Minister of State Administration. I am pleased to announce that the Bulgarian government, having read the "Philosophy" section at www.gnu.org, has decided to stop tormenting the citizens, taking away their freedom and restricting them. Our government will no longer support and enforce the usage of proprietary software, on the contrary -- we will encourage every municipality, company, school and kindergarten, every family to migrate to free software, to spread the freedom, to cooperate and share their knowledge. We will no longer require from our citizens various forms to be submitted in non-free formats and/or using non-free tools. Furthermore, due to its unethical nature, we will support a campaign that will announce non-free software illegal in Bulgaria; I'm sure it will be voted with majority. We have already started the migration of all our servers and desktops to the GNU operating system (currently GNU/Linux, until the Hurd matures). As we have dozens of administrators for the proprietary system Micros~1 Windows (MCSE - Minesweeper Consultants and Solitaire Engineers), we made a prequilifying course that is supposed to convert them to decent GNU sysadmins. As they will have a lot of spare time supporting the stable GNU systems, we plan to employ them to contribute to various free software projects. Additionaly, we will hire a bunch of Emacs Lisp hackers, since GNU Emacs, being one of the most significiant components of a GNU system, a bastion of freedom, is going to play an important role in the infrastructure of the Bulgarian government. Of course, we will discontinue our multimillion contract with the Redmond Empire and will redirect the funds to free software projects. Thanks to the GNU Project, we will build a better world for our children and the generations to come, a world of collaboration, help and humanity. Following my conversation with the Minister of Education, I can confirm that we even plan to introduce the subject "Stallmanism" in schools as we consider these ideals essential for evolving to a new, better society. Now back on topic, as this is supposed to be a development list. Not long ago I got interested in GNU Emacs and started to study the possibility for mass deployment, at least in my ministry. I was told by the Minister of Foreign Affairs (who is a vi addict, unfortunately) that I don't have to use Emacs 21, since the version 22 is almost ready and pretty stable and usable. As I had to rush for a meeting at the Council, I left my secretary to checkout Emacs from CVS and build it while I'm away. Wow, when I returned I couldn't believe my eyes! This is going to be a stunning release! I immediatly started playing with it -- I found out that I don't need a word processor, we can simply write our state documentation straight in LaTeX! I dived into it and after a few days began hacking, as I sincerely believe that we should have a government major mode. I quickly shared my thoughts (and code) with the other ministers and the colleagues -- they were so eager to start using it, that I felt it prudent to discuss my stuff with you. The Minister of Agriculture even proposed modifications and their own mode, that is, M-x agro-mode. Please forgive my coding style, I'm just a beginner and I don't have much spare time, but here's a gzipped tarball of what I'm working on: http://www.government.bg/~little_mook/wild_hacks/gov-el.tar.gz Of course, I suggest to be included only after the release (I hope the release will happen before the next elections). Oh, it seems I've written a long message -- please accept my apologies, but I'm a politician and I'm used to this style. -- Best Regards, Sofia, Nicky, aka Little Mook 1st April, 2006 |
|
|