However my own opinion is that all of the lists may be subscribed to by anyone. Many do. Many archive sites subscribe to the mailing lists and archive the messages. Full archives of all of the messages are therefore easily available elsewhere. The archive is not of subscribers. The archive is only of messages from people who have posted to them. Anyone who posts messages to public mailing lists must expect that the public will read those messages!
Indeed, and _anyone_ can subscribe to a list and our (the GNU projects) policy has also been not to require users to subscribe to lists to be able to post a bug report, or a question (though things might go through a moderation queue). Most of the lists also go trough a NNTP <-> SMTP gateway (like GMANE). Not providing the archives is a disservice to fellow hackers. Having list archives available easily it makes it trivial to import a mailing list and browse through the old traffic for previous bug reports, questions, and what not.
