In principle yes, in practice it's much harder. People want to be on the safe side, sure the claim that the piefed developer eats babies seemed a but dubious and the evidence didn't totally make sense to me but better safe than sorry I guess, there's a hint of truth in every legend etc.

Maintaining a large FOSS project seems to always become such a shitstorm I'm surprised there's anyone left doing it without profit incentives.

It's particularly frustrating to see in projects like PieFed that I've been following from the start and I know the software and the intentions of the developers quite well, only to see a bunch of tin foil nutjobs and no life trolls attack it for all sorts of reasons ranging from the absurd to the deranged.

Yeah, you'd think so. But months after it happened people were still casually saying "Rimu stole code from Pylova" so I gave up waiting and just set the record straight.