Final year DCU B.Sc. in Computer Applications students, Cillian Sharkey and Trevor Johnson, were recently awarded IBM ThinkPad laptops for winning IBM Dublin Software Lab's Eclipse - Open Source Software Innovation Competition. The competition, which was launched in September 2003, offers final year computing students from five universities - DCU, UCD, DIT, UL, and UCC - the opportunity to base their final year projects on Eclipse. I.T. Architects from Dublin Software Lab have worked with the students since September, offering support and advice on their projects.

Eclipse is an open source development community, launched in 2001 by IBM and several partners, including Borland, Rational Software, Red Hat and SuSE. Opening the award presentation, Bill Kearney, Director of the Dublin Software Lab, said that "the chief aim of the Eclipse community is to promote open source computing by providing software code as a public collaboration and make freely available the source code for use or modification as users or developers see fit."

The DCU students developed a Networked System Administration, which allows schools to easily deploy and maintain their computer networks with few resources. According to Cillian Sharkey, "Open source particularly appeals to schools because instead of having to fork out hundreds on software licences, they can get the software for free. Also, the technology doesn't require the latest PCs to work and so allows schools to re-use the old PCs lying around."

According to James Flynn, IBM University Relations Manager, the Competition and resulting awards session were a success because "In addition to the attendees being more aware of the range and scope of Eclipse, the session was a great opportunity for the college academics and students to network with IBM on further collaborative work."