Almost all open source projects have mailing lists or forums to discuss stuff related to the project. Almost all of those mailing lists and forums are archived.
These mailing lists are used to discuss design decisions. Hence we have a comprehensive capture of the discussions over time. If at a later point, someone needs to find out how and why things were done, the mailing list archives can help.
While the mailing list discussions archived over time captures project history, that is not the only source of project history. Often each and every commit to the source repository generates a mail. Also todays source control system can keep the history or the log of changes over time. When plugged with a Web view software, that becomes a very good information source of how the code has been improved over time. Given that people take care to key in a meaningful commit message, that becomes a powerful history tracking source.
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