Brecht just announced that he's leaving Blender development and that he has landed a new job at Solid Angle.

Brecht writes:

In July I will start a new job at Solid Angle, working on the Arnold renderer. This unfortunately means I will no longer be able to add new features to Cycles, though I'll still be around and happy to assist other developers.

Many important features in past releases have already been implemented by other contributors, and I expect that the improvements will keep coming.

As for other Blender development, I'll continue to be involved as a volunteer.

Many thanks to all contributors and users. I'm especially grateful to Ton for supporting my work on Cycles. I think we have pushed open source production rendering quite a bit further, and I hope to see you all continue doing awesome things with Cycles.

Thanks,

Brecht.