I just ran into this nice tidbit of info. You can hide the splash screen fairly easy in eclipse. It’s a command-line switch you pass to the eclipse run-time at startup. I found it while reading the “Running Eclipse” documentation. The switch is “-nosplash.”

If you’ve got eclipse open right now, you can try this link. Otherwise, it’s in help>help contents>workbench user guide>tasks>running eclipse.

That documentation also explains how to start eclipse and provide the switch, for both win/mac.