Authors should be a taxonomy and not being related to the user actually posting the content

[markkap]

For many sites the author information is not relevant at all as there is only one author. For many other (bigger) sites content is received as a "word" document and some "web master" use the CMS admin to publish it.
In other words, for many sites the author information as is used by WordPress is not helpful and in some cases just harmful (discloses the user name).

We are going to split the usage of author information as it being done by WordPress into two parts

1. Indicate who has the permission to edit the content
2. Front end indication of the actual author and ability to filter/search content by that criteria. This will be done by a dedicated taxonomy.

This will also solve the problem of multiple authors for the same content.

The breaking change here will be changes in the API, especially since themes and plugins are not expecting to have no authors or more than one author.

[markkap]

There are some permalink structure settings that are related to authors. Will need to look into what should be done there.

[markkap]

Probably need to add deprecation notice in the relevant author APIs

[mikeschinkel]

Definitely agree with this, as long as there is an option for the user to automatically sync the user with the author taxonomy when, for example, they are the only user for a small business site.