Actually nope; it does look as if the 35 year limit applies to licenses since the wording is "licenses and grants", whereas copyright transfers are a separate topic. It requires a grantee, though. Which is like I wrote before.
> Even if there were a doctrine that existing redistributors were grandfathered forever, so they could continue making copies and giving it away, the license would not actually be available to the recipients, who are not existing licensees.
Well, that doctrine is there: if you grant someone a copyright license and they take you up on it, they have 35 years before you can revoke it, in the United States.
It's not clear that third parties continue to have the same privilege after you indicate that the license is no longer available to new licensees.
I wish you could provide a few (or just one) examples of open source code versions retroactively retracted after having been open source before.
I doubt such a case exists, but if it does I'd love to learn its story.
According to Section 203 (grants made after 1978), it looks like you have to wait 35 years, and then in a five year window after that, you can terminate.
So there is a way, but the copyright grantees have over three decades' worth of protection.
This law is for specific grantees; like Bob assigns the copyright to Alice (other than as a work for hire done for Alice). Alice is now the copyright holder. 35 years later, Bob has the right to say Alice is no longer the copyright holder.
Bob has five years to do it. Bob must write Alice some kind of letter. The termination date must be no sooner than 2 years, and no later than 10 years, from that letter.
A free software license isn't a copyright grant so the termination business, and its limitations, may be inapplicable. The users of software aren't copyright grantees, and those who are currently non-users aren't anything at all.
Now about the Open Solaris code; while some of it has copyright notices mentioning only AT&T and/or Sun Microsystems, there is a boatload of hits for "Regents of the University of California".