Lots of businesses have agreements with vendors to keep the source code in escrow, in order for the business to be able to ensure continuity if the vendor goes out of business or abandons the product.
> We hereby irrevocably grant you an additional license to use the Software under the Apache License, Version 2.0 that is effective on the second anniversary of the date we make the Software available.
[1] https://github.com/billabear/billabear?tab=License-1-ov-file
It's something we had to deal with in a previous job where we (as a small company) sold products to Global 500 companies. Either we agreed to this, or there would be no deal. Every time we released a new version to those clients, we would place the updated source code (along with documentation and tooling etc) in escrow.
What exactly is escrow for source code? Some party you paid to upload a tar.gz to an sftp server?
We also had to details on how to actually build the product from the source, though I think they mostly just trusted us on that as long as we supplied a separate document - and by trusted, there were penalties spelled out in the contract about that too. (We were in good shape releng-wise but I expect a lot of companies would have to clean up their act to actually comply with that part.)
Only in the case of source code, I give them the code, and they won't give it to you until I go out of business. They get paid for that, of course. In our case, we uploaded source code an escrow service's servers.