Every spec, assessment, and contribution in the Golf Equipment Database is open data, published under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0). It's genuinely free — no gate, no signup, no catch.
Anyone may use, copy, adapt, and redistribute the data — for any purpose, including commercially. You don't need to ask. Two conditions apply:
The ShareAlike condition is deliberate. It keeps the data — and everything built from it — permanently open. No one can take the community's work, enrich it, and lock it inside a closed, proprietary product. Openness propagates. It's the same license Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap use, and it's a structural guarantee of neutrality, not just a promise.
Being straight with you: a single raw fact — a shaft's weight or torque number — generally isn't copyrightable on its own, so no license can “own” it. What CC BY-SA covers is the parts that are protectable: the curated collection as a whole, its structure, and the original editorial layer we and the community create — the fitting assessments, comparisons, and write-ups. The facts stay free for everyone; the curation and analysis are the open, shared work the license keeps open.
Contributors license their work to the public under CC BY-SA, and also grant GolferX, Inc., which owns and operates the database (and runs the Clubfitting.ai fitting platform that underwrites it), the right to re-license that work — including commercially. That grant is what lets the public database stay free forever (funded by the fitting platform) and, if it ever helps sustainability, lets us offer a paid commercial license to a business that wants terms other than ShareAlike. It never lets us gate, hide, or bias the public data — the charter forbids that, and it's the whole point. Full terms are on the contributor terms page.
A simple line works: “Data from the Golf Equipment Database (golfequipmentdatabase.com), CC BY-SA 4.0.” with a link back to the page you used.