The "mw_4a_config.bin" file you mentioned is a license file for the MATLAB software. It contains information about the license that has been granted to your organization, including the number of licenses and the expiration date.
When MATLAB is installed on a network license server, the server needs to be configured with a license file so that it can manage the distribution of licenses to individual users. The "mw_4a_config.bin" file is one such license file that can be used for this purpose.
It's possible that your colleagues dropped this file on disk to ensure that MATLAB would be able to access the license information it needs, without having to manually specify the license file location each time they started MATLAB.
