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 is notable for having provided the underlying technology basis for software offerings by IBM, Symantec, and McAfee, and thus provides part of the historical backdrop of some of those companies' most widely used offerings. FSA's best successes were with 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 FSA team went on to broaden McAfee's offerings from pure anti-virus to a broad-based security suite following FSA's acquisition by that company in 1996. The company is also notable for having served as the breeding ground for Theo de Raadt's ideas concerning open source, which led to the OpenBSD operating system. de Raadt was FSA's first non-founding employee.

Foundation of the company

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.

Consulting Phase

From 1989 through the end of 1991, Freedman and Sharp operated FSA as a consulting company, dealing at the driver and administration level...
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