Apple Inc. has made an interesting about-face, open-sourcing the FoundationDB database that the company acquired back in 2015.

Although FoundationDB might not be one of Apple’s best-known projects, it does do a very important job, serving as the backbone of its iCloud service, which stores and synchronizes data for the company’s millions of users. Apple said FoundationDB is a “scalable, distributed datastore, designed from the ground up to be deployed on clusters of commodity hardware,” with a focus on data consistency.

The decision Thursday to open-source FoundationDB is somewhat curious, though, since Apple upset a large swath of the developer community when it promptly stopped supporting the database after acquiring the company that built it. Just one day after completing that acquisition, Apple suddenly pulled the project from GitHub, deleting all of its associated files without any warning, leaving the software’s users high and dry.

“Pulling an open-source project upon which people may depend is total jerk behavior,” one angry commenter said at the time.

As to why Apple is now open-sourcing the project now, it’s most likely a strategy change rather than a belated attempt to appease those angry commenters. Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president at Constellation Research Inc., said the decision was probably related to Apple’s efforts to encourage more developers to work on its open-source Swift programming language, cryptographic libraries and benchmarking tools.

“It needs more attraction points for the developer community,” Mueller said. “A faster-developing FoundationDB, open-sourced, with development community participation certainly makes it a better place.”

Apple simply chose to talk about the merits of the software, saying it believed FoundationDB had all of the assets it needs to become the “foundation of the next generation of distributed databases.” The company said FoundationDB is built around a simple core with multiple layers specific to certain data types and separate access patters. By open-sourcing the database, Apple said, it can “expect the quantity and variety of layers to develop rapidly,” leading to an “ecosystem of layers” that will help to make the software more useful.

Apple has now posted the source code for FoundationDB on GitHub and is inviting interested developers to start making contributions to its code.

Image: Håkan Dahlström/Flick