Don’t have a games console and can’t stand up from your computer long enough to pick up that plastic guitar? Then Piano Hero might be for you! Piano Hero is an open source (MIT license) quasi-instructional software which allows users to learn how to play any kind of music, from your favorite video game themes, to classical and holiday music, via your computer keyboard. Piano Hero supports any MIDI file, let’s you slow down songs while learning various parts and is naturally only for Windows 2000 and XP for now, but let us hope that an OS X port is on it’s way.

Read more: Piano Hero

After 2 long weeks, Linden Labs has finally open-sourced the client for Second Life, the popular virtual world online “game” which has been a hot topic among the mainstream press. After the announcement several weeks ago a lot of excitement has grown around this daring move by Linden Labs, which may prove to be a huge boost for the case of open sourcing online game clients which benefit from community development and modding. There are currently quite a bit of project involved with Second Life already in the works, including a Solaris x64 port, a PowerPC port, packages for Mandrive and Debian, as well as an Ubuntu package.

Second Life client finally GPL’d

Second Life developers Linden Labs have announced that they are open sourcing their client software, possibly as a way to shift focus from the rising media backlash after their months of super-hype among the mainstream. A super bold move which has been wished for by fans and amateur hackers of Second Life since the beginning of time*, Second Life users will have direct access to the client to mashup, hack and crack new features into the anything goes world. Though it’s not clear if the announcement was accelerated by the recent media backlash, which began several weeks back throughout the blogosland or whether this was a planned announcement, I think it’s great that Second Life is taking this step, let’s just hope it breathes new life into the world and means less 48 year old men in diapers and football helmets propositioning every female avatar in their vicinity**.

(*) Second Life time that is.
(**) This never happened to me, honest.

Read more: Second Life goes open source