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An auto-update feature for Calibre would most likely greatly increase bandwidth use to distribute new copies of Calibre. It is not reasonable to demand that the author of a free program should have to pay for this. It could even be argued that third party auto-update software may actually harm the author financially.
One way to handle this might be to provide Calibre updates as diffs from previous versions. So only changed parts have to be distributed. Similar to the source distribution.
Another way to handle this in a more "author friendly" third party auto-updater could be to distribute new copies using peer-to-peer technology. Something similar to the bit-torrent protocol. A P2P updater could distribute the new update first to computers that in turn redistribute the update to others. Users that refuse or are unable to upload updates to others will receive the update last, or not at all if the process takes so long that an even newer version has become available and/or if too few clients are willing to redistribute the update to others.
Perhaps this forum should discourage use of third party updaters that have the potential to harm the author, if they become popular? And encourage development of an "author friendly" updater? There is no need to start from scratch. There are already several open source projects for p2p file-sharing that might be re-purposed...
Microsoft Windows 10 implements a variant of a P2P update, I believe.
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