Unicode detection is the kind of utility the language maintainers want in their package collection if not in the standard library, and programmers who have to do anything with "plain text" files might want to rely on.
Releasing a core library like this under a genuinely free licence (MIT) is a service to anyone working in the ecosystem.
I think they moved chardet from GPL to MIT? If the maintainer made future versions proprietery, they'd surely be forked and then kicked out of the python package repo?
Releasing a core library like this under a genuinely free licence (MIT) is a service to anyone working in the ecosystem.