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. History Early years 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. Shortly after the departure of Maurice Sharp, Freedman began to assemble materials for a 3-day UNIX security course. The course comprised over 500 pages of materials along with a tape of open source tools for managing the security of a UNIX network. Freedman marketed and taught the course 10 times in 1992 in various North American cities. He cites the course as being an important way of learning the concerns of system administrators, providing the feedback he needed to decide what products and services FSA would offer next. While the security course phase of FSA's history did not produce any notable products, the course served as an important mechanism by which the company could quickly engage with potential customers, learning their needs and deriving a plan for product development on the basis of what was learned. Load balancer Freedman's graduate work at the University of Calgary had involved the development of a process migration subsystem for networks of