Hi Pat,
If you deploy from staging to production, it is sufficient to enable it on the staging environment. The license activation is not mandatory, it only allows auto updating, it does not limit anything else. But since the staging is deployed to production, the updated files will be deployed to the production environment as well.
The activation script tries to recognize subdomains starting with “dev.” and “test.” on the same top level domain, but anything else is treated separately for security reasons.