The could be something something else: documents granting you certain permissions and denying others in a unilateral way, whether you agree or not.
"Contract" could be defined in such a way that such documents are not covered under definition. If a contract is some agreement that two parties negotiate and sign off on, then a copyright license isn't a contract.
In Anglo-American law, at least, a license is a permission which may either be gratuitous (most open source software license usually would fall into this category) or part of a contract (which requires mutual consideration, among other things, rather than a one-sided grant).
But, IIRC, gratuitous licenses are, in US copyright, enforced under contract principles, mutatis mutandis, not under the bare law otherwise applicable to the rights transferred. And I think the FSF is very much aware of that, and that is a big reason for the automatic termination on breach provisions of the GPL, to get back to the bare law, no license situation, at least after an established breach.
No. A gratuitous software license is a bare license. Because the licensor gets nothing, nothing is binding upon them. They may alter the terms of or revoke the license at any time, even notwithstanding promises in the license not to do that (as in the GPLv2).
The could be something something else: documents granting you certain permissions and denying others in a unilateral way, whether you agree or not.
"Contract" could be defined in such a way that such documents are not covered under definition. If a contract is some agreement that two parties negotiate and sign off on, then a copyright license isn't a contract.