As OP has pointed out, he's the LWN editor. But besides that, LWN has a feature to allow sharing subscriber-only links for a reason. They want people to share

As OP has pointed out, he's the LWN editor. But besides that, LWN has a feature to allow sharing subscriber-only links for a reason. They want people to share those links and discuss them occasionally, as long as someone doesn't create an aggregator that posts all subscriber-only links. And all of the articles become public after a week, anyhow. They are not trying to prevent people from discussing or reading articles; they are merely trying to encourage people to subscribe if they want to be able to see all of the subscriber-only content as soon as it's posted.