What legal precedent are you talking about?
In general, bare licenses (where the licensee does not give anything valuable to the licensor) can be revoked with sufficient notice. This is law in most jurisdictions I'm aware of. And this is taught to law students in their textbooks (heck if you just look up "bare licenses" in legal dictionaries you'll probably find something to that effect).
Do you have any standing to claim that OSS goes against this general rule?
The practical reason this doesn't happen is that revoking the OSS license of published code is pretty much un-enforceable and pointless exercise. There's no practical advantage that can be conceivably gained from such a stunt (unless you want the infamy for being the first person to attempt this), especially considering the PR fallout.
But I'll assure you that, if you actually try, and send emails to legal departments of sufficiently large companies notifying them that you revoked an OSS license of a project that you own, most of those companies will avoid using your projects and will try to transition away. I can't imagine any half-decent corporate lawyer advising the company that they definitely won't get into trouble because the precedent says OSS copyright owners can't do this.
FWIW I think some of them might actually tell you that you can't do this (which is mostly a bluff), but that's not going to be what they'll advise their clients/employers.
Disclaimer: IANAL but have a law degree.
If the software disappears from mainstream distros and its upstream repo is shut down, with notices that the free license has been revoked and forking isn't permitted, it's only a matter of time before it fizzles away.
If it's something of great interest to individual hobbyists, it might persist for years, but enterprises and institutions will not knowingly want to touch it. (If they really need it, they may seek licensing of the continuing proprietary version, if it exists).
If a security vulnerability is found in the code, it may need expert attention; but the experts will be required to perpetrate copyright infringement in order to fix it; it will have to be done anonymously. Then you need some place to host that and so on.
The proprietary version will have all the fixes and improvements, so that the old once-free version will just recede into the past as a broken old illegal version of a proprietary program, essentially no different from an ancient source code leak.
Your understanding is deficient. Some of the most popular free licenses like GPL and BSD don't restrict use. Users don't have to enter into the licensing agreement at all, only those who redistribute.
By using the software, you implicitly agree to the liability disclaimers, and that's about it.
All of the conditions in the license have to do with redistributing.
Licenses that restrict use in any way (e.g. "free for non-commercial use") are not free licenses.
> The company can't go on your disk and edit the license after you obtained the software and the license.
That's just a practical matter. If a license is revoked, the software will continue to be redistributed or used by people who don't even know about it. That doesn't mean it's legal.
The same thing could happen to software that was improperly licensed to begin with. E.g. a rogue employee took some code without company authorization and put it out with a free license. They can't go into people's disks and erase the bits, but the software is not legally free.
If you write a program and freely license it, such that Debian or Fedora pick it up, and then you write them a letter saying that the program isn't actually freely licensed, that it was a mistake, they will drop the thing like a hot potato.
The GNU project requires signed copyright assignments from contributors who make more than a trivial change. That protects (or hopefully protects) the projects from backpedaling problems.
> If the FOSS license was such that it didn't restrict use, but only redistribution
That's not a FOSS license to begin with.
> If a program has gone from FOSS to "cannot redistribute or use", the situation is like that existing licensees are allowed to give away copies, but the new users receiving them aren't allowed to do anything with those copies.
Users still get the copy with the old license. The company can't go on your disk and edit the license after you obtained the software and the license.
> Don't even think about maintaining a fork or anything of the sort.
Amazon does it… I'm sure their legal department was consulted.