So far today, we’ve talked to you about projects undergoing the transition to open source, in the form of HP’s webOS, as well as updates to a few Google Android apps. As fate would have it, those two paths are crossing, with some bittersweet news about Google Sky Map.

While Sky Map doesn’t help out your productivity like other Google apps do, and it targets somewhat of a specific niche (though we suppose astronomy geeks and smartphone fanatics are groups that would tend to overlap quite a bit), it’s still a pretty neat demonstration of augmented reality, and provides a good deal of entertainment to the intellectually curious. That’s why we were disappointed to see its inclusion on a list of products and services that Google will be retiring.

There’s good news at the end of this tunnel, though, as Google’s going to be passing the Sky Map reigns to a group out of Carnegie Mellon; with the app originating from Google’s Pittsburgh crew, that sounds like a perfect home for it. The app will go open source with CMU maintaining further development as students contribute new data to it. Sounds good to us.

Source: Google

Via: XDA-Developers