Red Hat does not provide a "license key" type mechanism today to ensure that customers have the requisite entitlements to install and use various operators.  The customers are allowed to install anything from the OperatorHub without any such "checks" being performed.

More recently, the OperatorHub experience has listed the required subscriptions at install time, in order to present the user with this information.  However, some customers are still not seeing this information; and this creates some issues; for example:  https://issues.redhat.com/browse/SUPPORTEX-22365.

Anecdotally, other customers and field teams, have also expressed misunderstanding of the required subscriptions for certain operators. There can be cases, such as, when a customer is only subscribed with OKE; and has essentially no entitlements to most operators; that may be confused with the presentation of these operators in their console and mistakenly violate subscription agreements when they install operators they have not paid for.  Some senior leaders in the BU in the past, have expressed concern about the visibility of the subscription requirements in the console as well.

It would be helpful to try to more prominently display at install time the required subscription, and continously display the required subscriptions post-install.

Potential ideas include:

• At the install step in the OperatorHub catalog, display the required subscriptions in a Patternfly alert at the top
• Display the required subscriptions in the Installed operators page table
• Display the required subscriptions in the details page of a given operator instance

Other ideas:

• If the cluster's subscription information is available within the cluster when it is OKE or OCP; perhaps all operators that require an OCP subscription should be disabled.