As long as you are happy with the terms GMail is offered under, and the feature set of the software, you are right, in the short term it probably does not impact your freedom in a way you are likely to notice. It may even enhance your short-term freedom by letting you focus on other things.
However, the fact remains that if you dislike something about GMail (the ads, the way it renders ASCII art, or maybe you wish it supported OpenPGP encryption), you are powerless to do anything about it. This also means that if GMail changes in some way you don't like (e.g. the recent UI changes), you have no choice but to accept them. If one day they decide to forbid normal attachments and force everything to go into Google Drive... well that's just too bad.
Basically, your choices always boil down to "take it or leave it", where leave it means migrating (or losing) your mail and learning to use a new app. This is not a trivial undertaking, even for a skilled user.
When you further consider how many people are putting their eggs in the same basket, these issues (especially the privacy concerns) become much more worrying. GMail, through its market dominance, is actively holding back the adoption of encryption and actively harming the privacy of entire nations. This wouldn't be a concern if it were free software people ran in a decentralized fashion.
Free Software comes with its own issues - running your own software and maintaining it does incur a cost. But with Free Software you have the option of doing things yourself or hiring someone to help you out. With non-free software, you don't have that choice.
How important these issues are to you personally will of course vary. But that doesn't mean Free Software supporters are wrong to believe these are problems worth spending time and effort on fixing. Raising awareness is of course a necessary part of that.
(disclaimer: I work on https://www.mailpile.is/, a Free Software project which aims to offer many of the features of GMail with strong emphasis on privacy/security, so I feel pretty strongly about this.)
But this comes back to why I keep saying that freedom is economically valuable. If you don't like something about Gmail, if you have all the components, you can bring another service to market.
This is what's missing in the discussion. The point of freedom is in production, in bringing things to market. There are certain things (like DRM) that Stallman does not want to be brought to market and so the FSF tries to discourage them using the license.
But that's a dangerous power, left in the hands of a few organizations and companies. I prefer to see this as something that should not be in the hands of anyone, but a case where the freedom to bring products and services to market is the primary goal of the movement. However, this only really exists in Distributism, and of this, the BSD license is the best fit.
However, the fact remains that if you dislike something about GMail (the ads, the way it renders ASCII art, or maybe you wish it supported OpenPGP encryption), you are powerless to do anything about it. This also means that if GMail changes in some way you don't like (e.g. the recent UI changes), you have no choice but to accept them. If one day they decide to forbid normal attachments and force everything to go into Google Drive... well that's just too bad.
Basically, your choices always boil down to "take it or leave it", where leave it means migrating (or losing) your mail and learning to use a new app. This is not a trivial undertaking, even for a skilled user.
When you further consider how many people are putting their eggs in the same basket, these issues (especially the privacy concerns) become much more worrying. GMail, through its market dominance, is actively holding back the adoption of encryption and actively harming the privacy of entire nations. This wouldn't be a concern if it were free software people ran in a decentralized fashion.
Free Software comes with its own issues - running your own software and maintaining it does incur a cost. But with Free Software you have the option of doing things yourself or hiring someone to help you out. With non-free software, you don't have that choice.
How important these issues are to you personally will of course vary. But that doesn't mean Free Software supporters are wrong to believe these are problems worth spending time and effort on fixing. Raising awareness is of course a necessary part of that.
(disclaimer: I work on https://www.mailpile.is/, a Free Software project which aims to offer many of the features of GMail with strong emphasis on privacy/security, so I feel pretty strongly about this.)