Seems like all four are related to licensing.

Licensing is merely a tool to achieve those goals. In a perfect world it would be unnecessary; in the real world it is not even sufficient.

> Cloud services are not free software, whatever the license.

That depends on the cloud service in question. The "big three" (AWS, Azure, GCP) certainly are not, but there are a lot of small/niche hosters running Kubernetes, OpenStack and other FOSS cloud software.

Perhaps I was unclear. Cloud services are not free software, regardless of whether their infrastructure is based on free software. Anything you cannot modify is not free. It's slightly more free for the developers, who at least get some say it what runs on the cloud - it's not free in the slightest for the users, i.e. the people whose personal information is being harvested.

As far as I understand it, from the point of view of the FSF they are neither free nor non-free, since, according to their terms, the software is not being "distributed" (you are not running it in your own computer).

Do those small/niche hosts allow you to modify the code running on their site? Do they allow you to inspect the source code and acquire any patches they have developed? It's not free software.

That doesn't seem required for the 4 freedoms listed. Could you elaborate which of those requires the providers to run your modifications on their system?

> The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish.

What part of that doesn't make sense? If the program is going to run on someone else's system then you'll need access to that system to be able to modify it to do your computing as you wish.

You can change it and run it as you wish on your hardware. There is no limitation on that. You are not required to run it on the host of someone else.

If you borrow my linux notebook for an hour and I don't give you access to chaning the software on it, doesn't change that linux is free software.

In the same way that free software distributers are not required to distribute your desired patches. They perform a service of distribution (or cloud providers: running the software)

But I think I get that you consider cloud services non-free outside of the pure software aspect. I think, though, that there's still meaningful distinction between providers running direct free software which you could essentially clone completely and run your own version and such that run closed versions, which do not allow that.

I have a hard time imagining how a host can let multiple customers exercise their freedom to modify the shared host software, each customer thereby wrecking the service for the other customers, or at least destroying the service level guarantees that presumably are being paid for.

With regard to the individual software each customer uses, often small/niche hosts do allow each customer to inspect and modify the software. That's kind of the point of cloud VM hosting, that you "have root" and can even modify your kernel if you wish.

This is a little nuanced. If we're talking about a cloud VM that you, personally, have root on, then indeed the software you choose to put on it can be considered free software (if you alone are the user). However, that software is not a service - the infrastructure that allows you to run it is the service (and obviously not free, although you're probably fine with that).

But that changes if you publish an interface to the software on your cloud machine, and allow others to use it. Now it's a "service" and that software is no longer free, because you have denied the four freedoms to its users.

Software as a service cannot be free software - it is a fundamental contradiction.

It's immoral for you to receive a remuneration for any services you render.

That nonsense again. You are explicitly encouraged to sell free software. Take it up with the English language that "free speech" does not mean I get radio advertisements for free.