yeah. of course. but if I send a pull-request or even just a patch created by "git format-patch" and that patch gets applied, then I am credited as author and

yeah. of course. but if I send a pull-request or even just a patch created by "git format-patch" and that patch gets applied, then I am credited as author and the person who put it into the official repository is credited as commiter. In SVN or CVS, you would do this by some comment in the commit message or the changelog but it's entirely optional and often such contributions are only visible in some mailinglist or bugtracker. This skews any analysis of contributor frequency in the traditional style of managing projects.