The Open Foundation Quantum Technology Needs

Why Open Source Infrastructure can Accelerate a Better Quantum Future

Quantum technology is no longer a distant science project. It is a field of active engineering and accelerating capital deployment, and its strategic importance is now recognized at the highest levels of government and industry worldwide. In 2025, private investment in quantum technology surpassed $10 billion (more than double the previous year’s record) bringing cumulative global investment past $55.7 billion. McKinsey estimates the economic value at stake from quantum computing alone at $0.9 to $2 trillion by 2035, driven by breakthroughs in pharmaceuticals, financial services, energy, and logistics. The White House ranked quantum technology second only to artificial intelligence on its 2025 Science and Technology Highlights. Quantum technology is now a significant focus of industrial policy across continents.

The national security implications are equally concrete. Quantum computers will eventually break the encryption that underpins global commerce, military communications, and critical infrastructure: an event the industry calls Q-Day. The CSIS Commission on U.S. Quantum Leadership warned that a quantum decryption surprise from a strategic competitor would threaten both national security and commercial communication. NIST has published post-quantum cryptography standards, but transitioning the world’s digital infrastructure to these new protocols is a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar undertaking. The risk to cryptography alone, as the Commission concluded, justifies major public spending on quantum technology.¹

What makes this moment unusual is the gap between the scale of investment and the maturity of the ecosystem. Billions are flowing into quantum hardware, but the software layer remains underfunded and fragmented.

In an emergent space like quantum computing, academic grants reward papers, not maintained software. A researcher who publishes a novel algorithm gets credit; the engineer who builds and maintains the compiler that makes it usable across three hardware platforms does not. Traditional Federal science funding is designed to push the frontiers of knowledge, but it is poorly suited to the unglamorous but essential work of software maintenance, documentation, testing, and community governance.

To unlock the value of this technological leap forward, we will need the compilers, benchmarking tools, error-mitigation libraries, and developer frameworks that translate hardware capability into real-world applications. We are building powerful hammers. Now we need the tools to find the most meaningful nails.

We think that tool is open source infrastructure. The history of computing is the history of open platforms unlocking unforeseen applications. No one designing TCP/IP in the 1970s predicted e-commerce. No one writing the Linux kernel in 1991 anticipated that it would run 90 percent of the world’s cloud infrastructure three decades later. The Apache HTTP Server, released freely in 1995, became the substrate of the early web economy. Openness allowed millions of builders to experiment, fail cheaply, and discover what worked. When Mozilla Foundation launched Firefox in 2004, it did more than offer an alternative browser. It broke a monopoly stranglehold on the web and proved that a non-profit, open source challenger could reshape a global technology market and defend the open internet as a public resource. The lever was not the product alone. It was Mozilla Foundation’s role as a neutral steward of open standards, holding the line on interoperability when market actors would not.

Open quantum software requires exactly this institutional function: a trusted, non-commercial party maintaining the commons. More recently, open source machine learning frameworks—TensorFlow, PyTorch, scikit-learn—transformed AI from an academic discipline into a global industry. The models running on these frameworks now power products used by billions of people. None of this was planned from the top down. It emerged from the bottom up, through open infrastructure.

Quantum computing is at a strikingly similar inflection point. The hardware is advancing rapidly. Multiple platforms, from superconducting qubits to trapped ions to photonic processors, are scaling toward hundreds and eventually thousands of qubits. But the field has not yet found all its best applications. Quantum computing applications need to be studied the way machine learning algorithms are studied: by putting tools in the hands of many researchers and practitioners, across many domains, and letting them explore. The performance of these algorithms is often unpredictable from theory alone. You need to try them.

Open source is how you make that exploration possible at scale. When a chemist in São Paulo, a logistics researcher in Berlin, and a financial engineer in Singapore can have frictionless access to the same quantum programming tools, the search for quantum advantage becomes a global, parallel effort rather than a siloed, sequential one. Open source lowers the cost of experimentation by sharing the fixed costs of infrastructure across many users. It allows researchers to build on one another’s work rather than reinventing wheels behind proprietary walls.

The best case scenario is an open-source quantum operating system that enables hardware platforms, cloud providers, researchers, startups, and government users to interoperate through a common, trusted software foundation. Just as Linux and related open systems software catalyzed decades of innovation in classical computing, an open quantum software layer is required to translate quantum advances into scalable, secure, and economically meaningful capability. Without it, the United States and the global quantum community risk continued fragmentation, duplicated effort, and slower capability diffusion.

Can’t Silicon Valley handle this? Not really. Venture capital funds companies with products and paths to revenue. Open source infrastructure projects are not companies. They do not have customers. They have users—often thousands of them—but no product to sell and no equity to return. These projects fall between the cracks. The economic downside is not abstract. Ninety-six percent of commercial software includes open source components. Harvard Business School research estimates the demand-side value of open source software at $8.8 trillion, i.e. the cost firms would bear if they had to recreate the open source code they currently use for free.² The quantum field, still in its early chapters, has the opportunity to build its ecosystem on an open foundation from the beginning. This is better than trying to retrofit openness later.

History offers a clear precedent. The U.S. government’s sustained investment in HPC, from the 1950s through the NITRD program and beyond, was driven first by national security and then by the recognition that shared computing infrastructure accelerated both scientific discovery and commercial competitiveness. By contrast, the United Kingdom built the first supercomputer but kept it locked in a secret facility and classified the research; leadership in computing went elsewhere.

Mozilla Foundation’s own history illustrates this dynamic from the philanthropic side. When Mozilla Foundation invested in building Firefox and defending open web standards, it was not because the browser market was failing to produce products. It was because the market alone would not protect the openness of the platform. Left unchecked, proprietary interests were closing the web. That work preserved the web as a public resource and catalyzed an era of standards-based innovation that benefited every participant in the ecosystem, from startups to governments.

Quantum computing now sits at exactly this juncture. We are asking three things of the leaders who will shape the quantum future.

1. To philanthropies: Treat open source quantum infrastructure as a category of philanthropic investment, just as organizations like Mozilla Foundation and others have long treated open internet infrastructure. The software layer of quantum technology is a public good. The leverage is enormous: for a fraction of what a single quantum hardware company raises in a funding round, you can sustain the shared tools and communities that make all hardware investments more productive.
2. To policymakers: Ensure that public quantum programs include funding for the software layer, not just hardware. The lesson of the HPC era is clear: without an open, interoperable software ecosystem, hardware breakthroughs remain siloed and difficult to translate into capability. Fund the compilers, the benchmarking platforms, the developer tools, and the communities that maintain them.
3. To investors: Recognize that open source ecosystems drive the market development that makes your hardware and application bets more valuable. Every startup that can prototype on open tools rather than building from scratch reaches product-market fit faster. Every researcher who can avoid being locked to one vendor generates the comparative knowledge that matures the market. Open infrastructure is not a competitor to your portfolio companies. It is the rising tide.

If you want to feed a fire, you need to create breathing space between the logs for oxygen to flow in as fuel. Open source software is that breathing space for quantum technology. It draws in the talent, the creativity, and the experimentation that will determine whether quantum computing fulfills its promise or remains an expensive curiosity.

Interested in learning more? Read the full white paper. And watch the related podcast interview here.