The preCICE distribution is the larger ecosystem around preCICE, which includes the core library, language bindings, adapters for popular solvers, tutorials, and vagrant files to prepare a virtual machine image.
The compressed source files of this data set are only meant to archive this specific version v2211.0 of the distribution and make it citable. If you want to use preCICE, please follow the information on the preCICE website.
For your first steps in preCICE, we particularly recommend the virtual machine, which contains all packages of the preCICE distribution, many supported solvers, and more useful tools.