This is really silly. Not fun or interesting at all. Gnu coreutils wants all the command line utilities to respond to --help and --version. The version number is that of the coreutils package, if your ls is Gnu ls, it'll say the same number too:

    [2] g@alpha (0)$ /bin/true --version
    true (GNU coreutils) 8.26
    Copyright (C) 2016 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
    License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.
    This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
    There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
    
    Written by Jim Meyering.
    [3] g@alpha (0)$ ls --version
    ls (GNU coreutils) 8.26
    Copyright (C) 2016 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
    License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.
    This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
    There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
    
    Written by Richard M. Stallman and David MacKenzie.
    [4] g@alpha (0)$ 

WRT AT&T true(1), well they probably were required to put a header in a certain format in every source file, and they put that in this one to. Probably the implementor just copied from a template and left it like that. Also I don't beleive they manually edit the years in copyright notices, one usually has a script to do that.