Just yesterday I noticed a "Fork Activation" option in the Fork menu with fields for an email and a license key. I think you might be right, it won't be free for much longer.
When I tried setting ZFS up on macOS, when I tried to set the ZFS pool as a network share through macOS's sharing panel any individual user permissions I set would not stay set after I closed out of the screen.
Is there another way of doing this that's recommended?