Brian E. Paul is a computer programmer who originally wrote and maintained the source code for the open source Mesa graphics library until 2012 and is still active in the project. Paul began programming initial source code in August 1993. Mesa is a free software/open source graphics library that provides a generic OpenGL implementation for rendering three-dimensional graphics on multiple platforms. Though Mesa is not an officially licensed OpenGL implementation, the structure, syntax and semantics of the API is that of OpenGL.