Alliance FAQ

Yes, see the privacy statement.

No, see the privacy statement.

No, see our privacy statement on this.

The open source project was founded in the year 2009.

No, SEB is open source software and free to download and use.

The ancestor of SEB called WinKeyOx was a closed source product invented in the year 2006 by Stefan Schneider, University of Giessen (Germany) at that time. Together with members of ETH Zurich, parts of WinKeyOx were made open source and were released together with new code contributions in 2009 as a SourceForge project under the Mozilla Public License (MPL).

SEB is open source and released under the Mozilla Public License (MPL).

The SEB open source project requires ongoing funding to continue its maintenance, development and support activities.

Between 2008 and 2009 the SEB open source project was financed mainly by ETH Zurich and in part by University of Giessen. From 2009 until 2014, the project was financed by the AAA/SWITCH and the Swiss Learning Infrastructure 2013 project framework as well as by ETH Zurich. From 2014-2016 ETH Zurich financed the SEB project on its own. From 2016-2020 there was a SEB Consortium in order to get some financing apart from project money. Due to changes in the Swiss VAT regulations the SEB Consortium had to be terminated in 2020 because we could not handle anymore the legal consortium construction with a reasonable administrative overhead. Starting in 2021 with the SEB Alliance we have a legal construction which sustains the ongoing funding of the Safe Exam Browser open source project to continue its maintenance, development and support activities.

From 2016-2020 there was a SEB Consortium in order to get some financing for the SEB open source project apart from project money. Due to changes in the Swiss VAT regulations the SEB Consortium had to be terminated in 2020 because we could not handle anymore the legal consortium construction with a reasonable administrative overhead. Starting in 2021 with the SEB Alliance we have a legal construction which sustains the ongoing funding of the Safe Exam Browser open source project to continue its maintenance, development and support activities.

No, this is neither feasible nor in our interest. Safe Exam Browser is intended to be a modular secure browser solution which works with any web based exam system. We can provide you with information and support on how to integrate SEB with your exam system (given an adequate SEB Alliance contribution level). We can also consider feature requests which are important for your exam use case. But it would be a waste of our resources to provide anyone with a customized SEB version just because they want a proprietary solution which opens directly their (and only their) exam system and is branded with their name and logo. Don't forget that any branch of a software requires additional work whenever an update is released. The bigger the changes from the official SEB version, the more software engineering and testing efforts would have to be taken with every single update for every supported platform.
We nevertheless will work on further easing the necessary configuration of SEB to connect to individual exam systems and add features which will allow you to customize the exam experience using SEB even more than now.

The MPL license under which SEB is released allows this, given the conditions listed in the license. This includes that you have to release changed SEB code parts under the same MPL open source license and have to attribute the original developers. But don't forget, your developers will have to work constantly on merging changes and bug fixes from new SEB releases into your own version. You will also have to do your own testing for any platform you want to support. In most cases this won't be very efficient. It would probably be more reasonable to contribute code for features you require to the SEB project.

No, the Alliance does not sell anything. Please note that the SEB Alliance is not a company. The Alliance is solely devoted to the SEB open source project which requires ongoing funding to continue its maintenance, development and support activities.

No, the Alliance does not offer contract work neither in the consulting area nor in the field of SEB software engineering. Please note that the SEB Alliance is not a company. The Alliance is solely devoted to the SEB open source project which requires ongoing funding to continue its maintenance, development and support activities.