Free software is a kind of software, which can be used, copied, modified and shared for non-commercial purposes by anyone with no fees or purchases. Examples of free software that I have used are for example GIMP image editor and Openoffice text editor. These are quite quality software freely downloadable from the web. Both of them are also open source softwares.
Open source software is a software, which has an open source code for everyone to see. It enables to study the code and find out, how does the coding work in the specific software. But for that you have to be a pretty good programmer I guess. But still if you can see the code, copy and alter it as you wish, it is kind of similar to free software, with some limitations - you are not able to modify the original.
The difference between the two software versions still remains a little confusing to me. Probably it is more of a question of ethics. Free software is a kind of way of thinking while open source is waiting for some income. I would not know which software to choose, as I don't know programming and can't read code very well, therefore I could not modify the code anyway.
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