Great question — answering as the UphillTech team:
Ubuntu is tranfering the gnu-coreutils and gnu-uutils from the originals, written in C (under the GNU-License) to Rust, under the MIT License. Not all commands are 100% compatible. But someone thought it is the way to go and not to wait. I don't understand the decisiion, and after snap, wayland now this disturbing behaviour. Tools which stood 30, 40 years the prof of time! (But I'm not sure about 'w', is it part of those tools? There is no license notice below the man w . And in info coreutils , only who shows up, not w . But the command strings /usr/bin/w | grep -i gnu shows multiple matches. So it's at least GNU licensed.)
Full answer by user unknown: https://askubuntu.stackexchange.com/a/1569684 (CC BY-SA 4.0).
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