The Unitary Foundation has opened its 2026 Quantum Open Source Software survey to map demographics, research, tools and platforms while building a public record of how the community changes.
The Unitary Foundation is asking the quantum software community to document itself before its tools and users become harder to track. Its 2026 Quantum Open Source Software survey covers demographics, research, tools and platforms, with the stated aim of producing an anonymized public snapshot of the field.
The questionnaire is not a processor benchmark and does not test quantum advantage. Instead, it is designed to capture who works with quantum open-source software, what they research and which tools or platforms they use. That distinction matters in a field where software ecosystems can expand faster than reliable information about the people building and depending on them.
The Unitary Foundation says the results will be analyzed and shared publicly after collection. The intended audience extends beyond individual developers: organizations can use the findings to assess whether products, services and events accommodate the community they claim to serve. In practical terms, the survey treats software access, developer participation and platform choice as indicators of ecosystem development rather than as substitutes for hardware performance.
Quantum workflows increasingly depend on layers that include software development kits, simulators, compilation tools, documentation and community programs. These layers connect experimental work in institutions such as MIT and CERN with education, commercial development and independent open-source contributions. A community survey cannot validate an algorithm or establish a platform's scientific performance, but it can show where the infrastructure is being used and by whom.
The initiative has run yearly since 2022, and the foundation points readers to the results of its 2025 survey. The 2026 survey was announced on October 1, 2026, while its stated closing date is Thursday, October 29, 2025. That date conflict is part of the supplied announcement and should be clarified by the organizers before readers rely on the deadline.
Annual repetition gives the exercise its strongest analytical value. A single survey can describe participation at one moment; repeated editions can show whether the balance of tools, research areas and users is changing. Comparable questions would allow the results to function as a descriptive time series, although interpretation will still depend on participation levels, sampling, response bias and the protection of small demographic groups.
Good survey design is especially important in a technically diverse field. A respondent may use a local simulator, a cloud-accessible processor, several software development kits or a research codebase that is not packaged as a conventional product. Recording those distinctions could help separate adoption of a tool from simple awareness of it, while anonymization can reduce the risk that individuals or small teams become identifiable through combinations of role, location and platform.
Quantum computing is often described through hardware milestones, but software determines how researchers access hardware, how experiments are reproduced and how workflows move between platforms. Open-source projects expose more of that infrastructure than proprietary demonstrations do, although a survey alone cannot establish code quality, performance or scientific validity. The broader reproducibility concern is familiar across large research programs, from NASA missions to computational work reported in Nature's quantum review.
The same ecosystem spans academic research, commercial development, education and community support. A recent earlier hardware report showed how photonic quantum ambitions can involve processor fabrication, optical packaging and hybrid-computing integration; the survey approaches the field from the software and community side rather than from a proposed hardware hub.
The foundation has not reported survey results in the announcement and provides no numerical findings about participation, tools or demographics. It therefore cannot yet support claims about which platform leads the field, which groups are underrepresented or whether open-source development is accelerating. Those questions are precisely what the data collection is intended to address.
Participants are being asked to contribute information that could help organizations make practical decisions about development priorities, training events and user support. The usefulness of the final dataset will rest on transparent analysis and clear limits around anonymization, sampling and response bias. As with surveys of scientific communities associated with organizations such as CERN or NASA, descriptive findings should be read as evidence about participation and infrastructure, not as direct measures of technical superiority.
That makes the survey a modest but necessary piece of quantum infrastructure. It will not make software interoperable or prove that any quantum application is useful, yet a field that cannot describe its users and tools cannot measure whether its ecosystem is becoming more accessible or reproducible. The Unitary Foundation is right to build a recurring public record; the value will come only if the published results remain methodologically clear and are treated as evidence about participation rather than evidence of technological performance.
