Yes the GPL as well can be revoked.

The copyright holder grants you a license, and that license can be revoked, wether it be GPL, BSD or Apache or whatever, and it applies to _all_ the softwares the copyright holder has rights to - ie all previous versions.

That is the reason why FSF and GNU encourage copy-right-assignment to the Free Software Foundation - as a kind of guard against any one hacker messing with a project.

BTW this copy-right-reassignment to FSF is similar to how Record Label companies reassign the copyright from their slaves, erm sorry, musicians/artists onto themselves and then govern them.

You can stop granting new licenses, IANAL but ability to revoke licenses you've granted (without allowance for this in the terms of the initial granting) would hugely surprise me. Of course, with the GPL that is still potentially messy.

Well go check it out, the license that you grant can be revoked.

The only reason this doesnt happen more is that most freedom software has many authors and a change in license would require consent from them all. But a really nasty person could still decide to rip his copyrighted pieces out of any previous version thus crippling the whole project.

But nobody is an asshole like that, but legally the possibility exists.

Isn't that still a matter of the prevention of granting new licenses, rather than revocation of existing licenses?