FSA Corporation

FSA Corporation (formerly Freedman, Sharp, and Associates) developed UNIX and Windows system level software for security and distributed system administration in the 1990s. The company provided the underlying technology basis for software offerings by IBM, Symantec, and McAfee. FSA's best known products were its Load Balancer distributed workload management solution, its PowerBroker secure system administration solution for controlling and auditing the power of root on UNIX networks, and its CipherLink network encryption solution. The company was acquired by McAfee in 1996. The company was a testing ground for Theo de Raadt's ideas concerning open-source software, which led to the OpenBSD operating system. De Raadt was FSA's first non-founding employee.

The company was conceived in a 1989 meeting between Dan Freedman and Maurice Sharp, both of whom had been asked by their Apollo Computer sales representative (Gary Erickson) to form a company that could serve and consult to Calgary-area oil companies with UNIX computer networks.

From 1989 through the end of 1991, Freedman and Sharp operated FSA as a consulting company, dealing at the driver and administration level with the large computer networks of the day (large in 1990 meant anything more than about 10 computers on a LAN).

In early 1992, Maurice Sharp chose to leave the company, taking a full-time intern position at Apple Computer. Freedman renamed the company from Freedman, Sharp, and Associates to FSA Corporation, and changed its focus from system-administrative consulting to distributed workload management.