Raspberry Pi VideoCore driver code released

It's actually not correct to bundle things like abstraction together with where functionality has migrated to over the years, mostly because functionality has migrated in different directions, whereas the level of abstraction in the components of the average system has mostly increased.

For example, video control was indeed done by the CPU in various microcomputers and then migrated to dedicated circuits of different forms and with increased sophistication, but other activities - notoriously, modems and printers - have seen the CPU bear the bulk of the workload in various periods. Much of this depends on whether it is considered worthwhile to have dedicated hardware for a particular task that could be done in software running on general purpose hardware.

I agree that for practical purposes being able to build these "drivers" from source increases the general level of support for the SoC in Free Software projects and is thus an improvement on the previous situation, but given the limitations on actually modifying the system's behaviour (the objections brought up by various driver developers), it's clearly not the milestone that we've been sold by the announcement.