Libbie the Cyber Oryx

Libbie the Cyber Oryx was the mascot I designed for LibreOffice’s mascot contest. Now people often refer to her as Libbie. LibreOffice is a free and open source office suite.

Design Concepts

Libbie is an Arabian oryx and a white collar lady to match LibreOffice’s purpose. Her look and color scheme were based on LibreOffice’s icon and VI color.

Libbie’s complete concept includes 21 pictures, each has a color and a black and white version. They cover Libbie’s core concepts, LibreOffice’s sub applications, some office situations, dark theme and male version. All pictures are formed by triangles, which was inspired by the Open Document Foundation (LibreOffice’s upstream project)’s black triangle icon.

The Cancelled Contest

The LibreOffice mascot contest was supposed to be a celebration and showcase of free and open source spirit, but it was not to be. The host party took many questionable actions — change of rules after the submission date, change of design of a particular candidate after entering the final round, not disclosing the voting results, etc.

The new rule forbid the usage of LibreOffice icon. And just like that, Libbie and many other high quality entries were eliminated. Those entered the final round were mostly low-quality, uncompetitive, or even outright stolen/stock arts. A green octopus candidate stood out because it quietly changed its design after entering the final round to meet the new rules. People suspected it to be LibreOffice’s internal submission.

The green octopus quietly changed design after entering the final round and removed the LibreOffice icon to meet the new rule.

As anyone would have expected, LibreOffice immediately faced a huge backlash as soon as they announced the final candidates. Many people stated their concerns and pointed out LibreOffice’s misconducts. And because Libbie was clearly a community favorite, people en masse questioned why LibreOffice wanted to eliminate her so badly.

Since the rule change was received poorly, LibreOffice then came up with another explanation, claiming Libbie didn’t have enough vote — but they never released the vote result. Not only that, it brought up another misconduct on their part — LibreOffice only showcased a single picture from each submission (we were never told about this beforehand). It was obviously unfair to the submissions that contained multiple images and descriptions to explain their concept. Either the LibreOffice people paid zero respect to our passion and labor, or they never intended to run a fair contest from the beginning.

Naturally, no one would buy into their explanation. Some suspected the contest was a public stunt by LibreOffice — they wanted to sacrifice all volunteer submissions to push forward their internal green octopus mascot idea. LibreOffice ended up cancelling the contest.

I don’t think LibreOffice’s cancelation announcement was done in a good faith. It had not even a single ounce of sincerity. They never truly acknowledged their misconducts. There was no explanation of what exactly happened and why. But when it was time to apologize (which they were obviously unwilling to do), they couldn’t wait until the sentence is finished to start accusing the community of pushing forward an agenda. “we were wrong, and so did you”. That was not how a sincere apology should look like.

I do not accept their empty, hypocritical “apology”. But I also do not care anymore, as I finally saw what they truly are now. I participated in this mascot contest out of good will, to help the free software movement. I wanted to support LibreOffice, not to hinder its development. So I avoided talking about the incident for many years.

Aftermath

LibreOffice required the mascot contest entries to license their works under Creative Common Zero (Public Domain). I did not want to walk back my decision, so Libbie has been in the public domain since. Anyone can use Libbie to do anything, there is no limit.

Libbie appeared in some indie games (Petal Crash、Freedom Planet 2), and a fan made Mega Man game, MAGMML: Episode Zero. People from the community remember Libbie fondly, and her tragedy is still being brought up from time to time.

Even though many years have passed since the incident, I still felt deep sadness and grievance when I was preparing Libbie’s pictures for this post. I came to the conclusion that I should write down what happened, as a send-off of the past self, and as a cautionary tale to the future self.

At the time of the incident, I was in the middle of a low period as an artist, and I was already mentally stressed to a breaking point. I answered LibreOffice’s call of action, as though it was a chance to contribute something useful for free software movement. By doing that, I might also hope to prove to myself that I was still capable as an artist. It took me at least one month to finish drawing Libbie’s pictures. I poured my heart and soul into Libbie, but my good will was betrayed — Libbie was more like a nuisance to LibreOffice’s agenda, and she was thrown out of the window like a piece of trash.

Not only that, although many people sympathized with me and Libbie, a considerable amount of artists (some were even acquaintances at the time) criticized me for entering the contest. They accused me of participating in a free contest for fame, disrupting “the market”, causing artists like them to not get commissioned — for that I was an accomplice of the predatory corporations, and I deserved my ill fate. They despised my volunteer spirit, and they appeared to feel very good for themselves because of my failure. It hurts more because some of those words came from whom I considered friends. I was very disappointed by those people. I just could not believe someone can be so selfish and inconsiderate.

This incident magnified my mental stress significantly. I was trapped in deep self-doubt and disillusionment of the world in general for many years to come. Through countless painful flashbacks and reflections, lessons were learned:

Follow your conscience, you know what’s the right thing to do. Do not be clouded by vanity. Meaning of life cannot be sought outside your heart.
Beware of the predators that pretend to be advocates of good values.
No one is entitled to anything, regardless of your good will or ability.
Only pay attention to the process of what you do — it is the only part you have control of. Your responsibility lies there, and it ends there.
The result of what you do is out of your control, just let it be.

There is one thing I will always remember — that one month when I was drawing Libbie, I was happy, and I felt very fulfilled. The happiness didn’t come from whether LibreOffice would accept her, but because I was working with my true heart to the point I forgot my “self”.

The Libbie incident had a profound effect on my personality. It shattered my naïveness, forcing me to look into the reality of myself and the world. It was a sad story, but in the long run, I think the net effect is very positive.

I’m going to give Libbie a role in my original projects, so that she can have a spectacular life in my story.