Licensing

Everything published free is licensed so that it stays free. This page says what that means in practice, and what will change when a paid release exists.

Free data: CC BY 4.0

Free population releases and every article's companion dataset are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. You may copy, redistribute, remix, transform and build on the data for any purpose, including commercially, on one condition: credit SparkyData and link to the licence. Once something is published under CC BY it stays available under it permanently — the licence cannot be withdrawn, and we would not want to.

How to credit

A line like this, wherever you would normally cite a source, is enough:

SparkyData, "The six-figure renter" companion dataset, 2026. CC BY 4.0.
https://sparkydata.dev/articles/six-figure-renter

Articles and code

Article text is © SparkyData; quote it with attribution as you would any publication. The analysis code that ships with an article is published under the same CC BY 4.0 terms as its dataset unless the file says otherwise.

What the data is not

• Every record is synthetic. No record describes, corresponds to, or was copied from any real person, household or address, and the data must not be used as a factual record of, or the basis for any decision about, any real person.
• Article datasets carry freshly randomised identifiers. Datasets from different articles cannot be joined, and attempting to reconstruct an unpublished dataset from them is a prohibited use under the Terms.
• This product uses Census Bureau data but is not endorsed or certified by the Census Bureau. Do not represent it as official statistics.

Paid releases, later

The plan, stated up front: when full population releases exist, the newest one will be a paid product for its first twelve months, under a commercial licence that allows internal use and derived outputs but not redistribution of the raw files. After twelve months it converts to CC BY 4.0 like everything else. Nothing already published free will ever become paid, and minor releases do not restart the clock.

Questions

Academic or non-profit use of a paid release will be free on request. For that, or anything else about licensing, write to sparkytech.dev@gmail.com.