Skip to content

STE register

Governance#

The stance#

Valence favors no firmware, no vendor and no product. It is provided to the community as a tool.

That sentence is the whole stance. Everything below is what it means in practice.

What that means in practice#

No firmware is the reference firmware. Nucleus happens to be where Valence was written and where it is proven on hardware. That makes it the first implementation. It does not make it the privileged one. A conforming hub is a conforming hub.

No vendor gets a reserved number. The registry allocates by pull request, in the open, on technical merit. There is no vendor block, no paid range and no private extension space that anyone else cannot read. Device-defined ranges exist and are open to every device equally.

No product is designed for. A feature lands because the protocol needs it, not because one machine wants it. When a proposal is really "make my product easier", it is refused, and the refusal is recorded with its reasoning.

The specification is the product. The C++ library is its reference implementation, not its definition. If the library and the specification disagree, the specification wins and the library has a bug.

The registry is the single source of truth. Where any document, any library and any table disagree about a number, the registry wins. That rule is mechanically enforced: the C++ constants and every table on this site are generated from it, and a stale copy fails CI.

Released numbers are never reused and never renumbered. Not for tidiness, not for a better name, not for a nicer grouping. A number burned by a retired feature stays burned, so a stale peer meets an unknown value and fails loudly instead of misreading a live one.

Honest defects are published. The fuzz campaign found three memory-safety bugs before release, and they are documented rather than quietly patched. Publishing found-and-fixed bugs is a credibility asset. A protocol that claims a clean history is either very young or not telling you something.

What Valence will not do#

  • It will not require a specific motor driver, motion planner, transport or cloud service.
  • It will not gate any part of the wire protocol behind registration, certification or a fee.
  • It will not add a capability that only one machine can implement, unless the capability is optional and its absence is discoverable.
  • It will not describe how a client should look. It describes what things are. There is no widget field in the catalog, deliberately.

Changing this page#

This page states a stance, so it changes only by explicit decision, never as a side effect of an unrelated edit. A change here is an RFC like any other. See the RFC process.

See also#