The Blender Developer Notes says that Brecht will make a batch for review…etc. Is he back to Blender dev?
He never left. He’s just not working on cycles part of blender because of his job.
It is about the Free in Free open source software 
However, he’s still playing an important advisory role with Cycles development and he’s even reviewing patches (he’s just not writing any code himself).
It’s so amazing how much some people are able to do work. I think he is very passionate person and I think it is cool.
he is also reviewing bugs on occasion!
but not at full time !
happy bl
For those of you who don’t know, he works at Solid Angle on the Arnold Rendering Engine. That’s why he can’t actually develop cycles (I have a feeling that if he did, it would end up being, to an extent, a free version of arnold)
He needs to make Arnold fully integrated with Blender! I love that renderer. I’m sure it’s crazy expensive though.
nevermind, renembered it wrong
I wonder if Brecht’s heart stopped for a moment when he heard that he’s under the Autodesk umbrella of doom.
@Brecht, the Blender umbrella is still nice, warm and fluffy and ready for if you ever decide to return
You’ll be amazed at how nice, warm, and fluffy a steady living wage can be. 
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Haha, i’m fully aware of this, and enjoying it. but the BI also offered him that.
I didn’t know that the amount the Blender Institute offered Brecht was public knowledge. As far as I was aware, Brecht was offered a position but the amount & nature of compensation was between him & Ton… and not enough to prevent him working for someone else.
I may be wrong though and, if so, I’d be interested in the amount. I’m always interested in a little more transparency around Blender Foundation/Institute finances. 
It looks like Brecht’s activity has increased to the point where he’s doing some development work in Cycles again
https://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-blender-cvs/2016-May/085985.html
https://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-blender-cvs/2016-May/085986.html
https://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-blender-cvs/2016-May/085987.html
https://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-blender-cvs/2016-May/085988.html
I’m not sure how this became possible all of a sudden (and these commits aren’t one or two lines either), either Autodesk is fine with him doing some Cycles development work (perhaps because it’s no threat to their Arnold acquisition for the foreseeable future), or he’s no longer a part of Arnold’s development team (or the team of any commercial render for that matter).
That’s not to say that we shouldn’t welcome Brecht back to the Blender core team if he so chooses, the possibility of him returning would only be a good thing for us.
We need a Realtime Render,
if brecht joins to start working the viewport, we just may see a blender rebirth in 2.8
The future is not hours and hours of rendering,
I think in the next 4 years, we will see gpu capable of photorealistic renders
at 60 fps,
some day soon, we may see live performances using mocap powered by blender.
That’s called a viewport and as you know the developers are working on that and it is also a target for Blender 2.8.
Yes, that is why I said viewport, like 1 sentence later*
You would be nuts to try to cram a full production scene into the VRAM of the average GPU in 2016 (scenes that can go into the hundreds of gigabytes as far as memory requirements go). I’m also not really sure if a card can even make use of CPU RAM in a way that allows a large scene to converge at realtime rates (as opposed to a still fast, but non-interactive rate).
Also, it’s not going to be possible to render completely physical effects (along with full, unbiased GI with caustics) for a while yet. The much celebrated PBR shaders and realtime GI solutions still have to resort to shortcuts to reduce the intensity of the calculations. Also, the cool real-time rendering demos from OTOY (which I’m sure you’ve seen) are done on a good-sized rack of top-of-the-line GPU’s carrying 4 digit pricetags.
I would think as of now, the realtime technology would be more than sufficient to replace the old Internal Engine, but that would be because you’re be asking a lot less of the GPU to replicate the old scanline tricks at 60 frames per second.