Take another look at the original message from Monty:
http://lwn.net/1999/0211/a/monty.html
If you read it again, you'll notice that he never mentions AFS. He's not asking for binary compatability for the convenience of proprietary products. (Your feelings about THAT are quite understandable.)
He's talking about the administrative overhead of maintaining multiple incompatible binaries for THOUSANDS of machines. They obviously have source code available; he's talking about how they have finished building the third incompatible set of binaries. They're supporting machines across a wide range of kernel and library versions; they obviously can't force their users to track the bleeding edge.
For Linux to actually achieve World Domination (and I think it can), one of the keys is to reduce Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) -- eliminating administrative nightmares such as gratuitous incompatabilities is a big part of that. So is code stability; sure, Linux is extremely stable, but binary incompatibilies can make stable programs APPEAR to be buggy if you forgot to recompile something. Recompiling everything is a major undertaking even for ONE machine; it should be a rare event with a compelling reason.
This is not about making it easy to use AFS without source code. This is about eliminating unnecessary administrative overhead on MILLIONS of computers (all Linux systems), at the expense of a bit more discipline on the developer's side of things. Please don't impose this administrative overhead simply to spite the AFS developers. We'd all rather see source for AFS, but there's much more at stake here.
A cavalier attitude towards this issue is ultimately quite costly to the entire Linux community, in both direct administrative costs and opportunity costs of possible development work that never takes place because of the administrative overhead.
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