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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.

Maybe. Enabling more GPL software to become proprietary isn't exactly a service.

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?

That's what MIT does. It lets downstream versions become proprietary.

Nobody that is not already writing (L)GPL licensed software wants to pull LGPL licensed libraries into his software. I'm not a lawyer. If you have it in separate object artefacts that you can dynamically link to, you should be fine. Everything else may be more difficult.

See what FFmpeg writes on this topic: https://ffmpeg.org/legal.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47260749