The line between collaborator and contributor can be a blurry line, and there are many ways to define contribution, but here's one good way of thinking about it: a contributor is a person that a FOSS community actively relies upon for help.

Of course, some contributors focus on writing code -- but for the most successful projects, this is a comparatively small percentage of contributors. Some contributors maintain a wiki and help keep it up to date. Some contributors test every new beta version the day it's released. Some write documentation about the project. Some go through bug reports, to make sure that bugs are useful for developers. Some blog about the new features to help spread the word.

All of these contributors are making their projects better -- and every FOSS project needs more of these kinds of contributors.

It is our hope that this book will help guide you, the reader, to the top of the Contributor Mountain.