Building the License Platform v1 engine without collapsing commercial and technical state
Phase 4 connected subscription and entitlement state to a versioned signed credential while retaining explicit license lifecycle, activation and online/offline validation boundaries.
Problem
Subscription is a commercial relationship, Entitlement is the effective right, and License is the signed technical credential. Treating them as one model would make history, policy and enforcement harder to reason about.
Implementation
The completed phase introduced a versioned license format, policy-aware issuance, activation records, heartbeat leases, versioned signing keys, explicit lifecycle history and online/offline validation behavior.
Outcome
Phase 4 closed as COMPLETE on 2026-09-28. The report also records defects found by new integration coverage and fixed before closure rather than hidden from the public engineering story.