If I'm understanding you right, I think I had equal confidence in the opposite direction. In my mind, responses always flow downstream. It's obviously not j

If I'm understanding you right, I think I had equal confidence in the opposite direction. In my mind, responses always flow downstream. It's obviously not just you, but at this point I think the right conclusion is the concept is too conflicted to be used unless one is speaking to a small group who has already agreed on a local definition. What I'm not sure yet is whether the terminology is equally conflicted when talking about open-source projects. If one project depends on another, do we agree that the dependency is downstream of the original? That is, does everyone still agree that the official Linux Kernel is upstream of all Linux distributions? Or do some people view the patches to the kernel as being sent downstream?