Proposal for government mode

[Nikolay Vasilev]

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