feat: drop the subscription licence and the file that gated it

[blaipr]

get_licenser chose between two answers by whether /var/lib/ascender/.tower_version existed: present meant the subscription product, an entitlement manifest to parse and a subscription to keep in date. Nothing in this ecosystem has ever written that file, so the only way to reach that branch was to carry it over from the Tower an install was migrated from. It returns the open licence, always.

Follows #948, which stopped the remote calls to Red Hat. What was left was the local machinery and the pages in front of it.

The licence

• The Licenser class, its certificate parsing and expiry arithmetic: licensing.py is 51 lines where it was 288.
• POST and DELETE /api/v2/config/ answer 400 saying there is no licence, rather than vanishing into a bare 405.
• The EULA, server_product_name, and the inventory source that chose redhat.satellite over theforeman.foreman.

The pages, which were already unreachable

The settings page redirects to /settings when the licence type is open, and the usage route is deleted unless SUBSCRIPTION_USAGE_MODEL is unique_managed_hosts, which defaults to empty. That is the point @cigamit made on the forum.

Gone: the Subscription settings screen and its manifest wizard, the Subscription Usage screen and its API model, the settings entry, route and breadcrumbs, and the gate that sent every route to the wizard when no licence was valid.

The enforcement

check_license and check_org_host_limit both opened by returning early on an open licence, so neither has done anything on a normal install. They are gone, and with them the validate_license parameter on seventeen can_start and can_add signatures.

That parameter had outlived its purpose in a way worth naming: check_related called can_access(type, 'start', resource, None) where the None was meant as the data argument can_change takes, and instead landed on validate_license. An argument meaning "no data" was reading as "no licence check".

inventory_import held its own copies, including a remote_tower_license_compare only the tests called. license_error and org_host_limit_error stay on the model, since they are API surface, and are simply never set now.

The rest were questions with one answer: the scheduler refusing to spawn a job when the probe raised, the bulk host create counting free instances after it had already enforced the organisation limit, the webhook status context, and the User-Agent naming the licence type. The last two keep the exact string they produced, so nothing on the wire moves.

The Red Hat analytics upload

Nineteen /api/v2/analytics/ routes proxied to console.redhat.com and authenticated with the subscription credentials, so with those gone every one answers an error. The routes, the gather_analytics task and the collectors that only filled that payload go with them. config, counts, instance_info, job_counts and job_instance_counts still feed /api/v2/metrics.

Ten settings are unregistered, LICENSE, INSIGHTS_TRACKING_STATE and the four AUTOMATION_ANALYTICS_* among them, and conf migration 0014 deletes their rows so a Red Hat username and password do not sit in an upgraded database with no screen left to clear them from.

The config endpoint

license_info answered with four constants: valid_key and subscription_name meant nothing, license_type was always open, and product_name was a second brand string. eula was already an empty string nothing read. Both are gone from /api/v2/config/, and nothing replaces them.

product_name needed no new home. The brand already has a canonical source, BRAND_NAME in default.strings.json, which is the file a white-labelled install edits and which useBrandName() feeds to the About modal, the login page, the settings list and six other places. Only AppContainer read the licence blob instead, so its masthead labelled the logo Ascender while everything else said Ascender Automation. It uses the hook now.

With nothing left calling it, licensing.py is a constant and server_product_name(), which is all the X-API-Product-Name header ever needed. Licenser, OpenLicense, get_licenser and MAX_INSTANCES are gone.

Every remaining license_type comparison in the UI was dead, so three go with it:

• Max Hosts on the two organisation screens. Both blocks were wrapped in license_type !== 'open', so neither has rendered for as long as this fork has existed, and removing them changes nothing a user can see. max_hosts stays on the model, in the serializer, in the form's payload so an edit round-trips it rather than clearing it, and enforced on bulk host create. Whether it should return as a visible control is a separate question.
• The Pendo field in UI settings, disabled under an open licence, which the backend already refuses to change.
• issuePendoIdentity wrote three values into license_info that nothing read, and fed Pendo planLevel, planPrice, creationDate and trial from top-level fields that only ever existed inside license_info, so they have been sending undefined since AWX.

AppContainer used !!config.license_info to decide the config had loaded, which made the app wait on a licence to render. It reads version now.

Host metrics is deliberately untouched: opening that up for everyone is a decision rather than a removal.

Follow-ups

Both call routes this removes: ascender-collection#309 drops the license and subscriptions modules and the license role, and ascender-kit#74 drops the config properties reading fields the endpoint no longer returns.

Checked

Full Python suite green, ruff check, ruff format --check and yamllint clean, no missing migrations. Migration 0014 run against a database with every removed key planted deletes exactly those and leaves the rest. UI eslint, prettier, tsc, the catalogue check and both UI suites pass.