Disclaimer; I'm not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV. A copyright license is a copyright license: in theory, all a copyright license does is give you addition

Disclaimer; I'm not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV. A copyright license is a copyright license: in theory, all a copyright license does is give you additional rights to use something. Using a license like Apache 2 for binaries is somewhat unconventional, but it's totally possible. It (obviously) does not give you access to the source code, and I think this could never work with the GPL and other copyleft licenses because they use wording that implies you need to distrubute the source code, which you don't have. The copyright owner, of course, has ownership, so their obligations don't really change by virtue of giving someone a copyright license. As far as I know, they could give someone a license to use something that is completely invalid and could never actually be used, and they can definitely do things like stop distributing under one license and switch to another. They own the source code, and they own the binaries (I believe the binaries would be considered a sort of derivative work in copyright terms, but again, not a lawyer.) So when they distribute a binary under a given license, it's unrelated to any particular distribution of source code. The only time this gets complex is when the ownership of a asset is split among many disparate parties, at which point everyone is pretty much beholden to the copyright licenses; like open source projects without CLAs. But if they own the source code entirely, they could, for example, distribute some source code under GPL, but then distribute modified binaries under a commercial license with a EULA, and not redistribute the modified source code, since it's their code to license to others, not a license they are subjected to themselves.