The South by Southwest Interactive conference purports to showcase the best minds and brightest personalities in emerging technology. The Interactive portion of this year's event took place from March 12-16 in Austin, Texas. The entire SXSW festival is composed of Interactive, Film, and Music conferences and turns the city of Austin into one large media fest.

Last week, Google unveiled the 150 mentoring organizations selected for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2009, and students can begin submitting applications now.

Activist group LinuxChix is warning of threats to Linux and open-source posed by new copyright laws in New Zealand. The proposed laws threaten to force ISPs to disconnect users and close websites accused of copyright infringement.

Self-contained pre-conferences marked day zero at the seventh annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE), including the Women In Open Source (WIOS) conference, Open Source Software In Education (OSSIE), a Fedora activity day, two training tracks, and a Zenoss community day. One mini-conference grew large enough to spin off as a self-contained entity: the Demonstrating Open Source Healthcare Solution (DOHCS) conference, now in its third year, examined the comparatively low-profile work undertaken in the medical field.

The Green IT theme has its definite place at CeBIT 2009, with a true defender. The BITKOM German industry association is launching the Green IT World forum on Tuesday, March 3, in Hannover.

Finally there's a free alternative to the proprietary Flash on the web. Unfortunately, it implements Microsoft technology whose software patents might render the free Moonlight license useless.

The seventh annual Southern California Linux Expo, held February 20-22, included a wide variety of talks on open source projects, system administration, and software development from luminaries in the open source community. This year’s conference was larger than ever and included keynotes from Bradley Kuhn, President of Software Freedom Conservancy, and Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier, openSUSE's Community Manager. Kuhn talked about concerns with Software as a Service (a.k.a. the cloud), and Brockmeier discussed ways to improve the reach of an open source project.