At the IBM Dublin Software Lab's Eclipse - Open Source Software Innovation Competition two DCU students, Cillian Sharkey and Trevor Johnston, won IBM ThinkPad Laptops for their project Networked System Administration system for easy deployment and maintenance of advanced networks in schools with few resources. The projects where made possible by the use of Eclipse which is an open source software development community, launched in 2001 by IBM and several partners, including Borland, Rational Software, Red Hat and SuSE.

Bill Kearney, Manager of the IBM Dublin Software Lab., ,Cillian Sharkey, Trevor Johnston, winning students, James Flynn, University Relations Manager, Charlie Daly, Lecturer in the School of Computing, DCU

Opening the award presentation Bill Kearney, director of the Software Lab (DSL) spoke about the importance of open source computing and why IBM is involved with Eclipse. "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."

" 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" said James Flynn, IBM University Relations Manager.