At least in my experience, it's very common for vendors to provide you with the source (through a licensed agreement) but deliberately limit your ability to bui

At least in my experience, it's very common for vendors to provide you with the source (through a licensed agreement) but deliberately limit your ability to build it. Sometimes this is through licensing, sometimes it's by excluding some key portions of the build chain (e.g. internal libraries that don't directly relate the the functionality of the software). At any rate, at my current employer, we have lots of things where we have the source as well as the libraries and headers, but don't have the capability to build those libraries from source. It sounds silly, but it's still vastly better than having no source access whatsoever. At least for us, we often need to understand an implementation detail of a proprietary library, but being able to actually build things is secondary.