On startup, if the license server was unreachable with no usable cached status, or the server rejected the key, we only logged a warning without clearing persisted license.state. On Redis/keyvalue deployments a previous run's Licensed=true could remain active even though pro features were advertised as unavailable. Route both paths through degradeToFree so the persisted state is cleared.
Implement the license validation system with:
- Server communication with retry logic and exponential backoff
- In-memory state management for feature flags and user limits
- Cached validation with 72h expiry stored in database
- Background goroutine with adaptive check intervals (24h/1h)
- Graceful degradation to community mode on failure
- Instance ID generation and persistence
