Merge pull request #416 from unitaryfund/nathanshammah-patch-25

Create 2023 survey results blog post

src/content/blog/2023_survey_results.md

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+---
+title: "The State of Quantum Open Source Software 2023: Survey Results"
+author: Ben Castanon and Nathan Shammah
+day: 4
+month: 12
+year: 2023
+---
+
+We are excited to share the results for the 2023 Quantum Open Source Survey organized by Unitary Fund! A giant thanks to our supporting and core members, as well as our board and advisors for their guidance and feedback. Thank you as well to our outstanding open source community for their input, ideas and passion! 
+
+We hope this snapshot of our field can help the many diverse stakeholders of quantum technologies to get a holistic understanding of the users, tools, needs and strengths of the ecosystem today. As the second annual survey we are also excited to provide certain comparative metrics to view how things may have evolved since last year. 
+
+[![](/images/qoss-2023-results-language-yoy.png "Language of Choice for QOSS development with Year-on-year (YoY) comparison 2022-2023.")](https://unitaryfund.github.io/survey-website/)
+
+[**You can find the results at this link.**](https://unitaryfund.github.io/survey-website/)
+
+## Demographics [[link]](https://unitaryfund.github.io/survey-website/#Demographics)
+**Demographics**: As in 2022, the majority of quantum OSS users are researchers (53.8%), however, sizable communities identify themselves as developers (39%), students (27.5%), hobbyists (16%) and educators (12%). This data speaks for the balanced heterogeneity of interests and sub-communities among quantum OSS users and developers. Almost 45% of respondents do not have a background in quantum research.
+
+Most have selected their main reason for involvement as advancing quantum science and knowledge. The respondents are also mainly associated with an academic institution (43%), enterprise organization (32%) or a startup (25%).
+
+The most represented country continues to be the United States (25%), with the UK making the largest leap, up to 13% from 9% last year. India (10%), Canada (7), and Germany (4.5%) round out the top five. EU countries sum up roughly 18. In all, 56 countries are represented in the survey, speaking to the continued spread of access and enthusiasm for the field. 
+
+The majority of respondents either work full time (53.6%) or part time (9.2%) in the quantum industry, and among those, about 27% work fully remote, about 36% employ a hybrid format, and only 15% are fully in-person. Fully remote work featured the only large change (7%) YoY, with the others holding at similar percentages to last year.
+
+## Experience [[link]](https://unitaryfund.github.io/survey-website/#Experience)
+About 91% of respondents use quantum software, of which about 47%are solely users, and 53% are either OSS project contributors, maintainers, or owners. 
+
+## Cloud services [[link]](https://unitaryfund.github.io/survey-website/#Cloud-services)
+The most popular service remainsIBM Quantum (70% of respondents are current users), though this represents a 10% decline over last year. IBM is followed by AWS Braket (19% are current users, and 19% would be interested in trying it out in the next 12 months). Quantinuum took the largest leap forward in current users into third place, moving from 8% to 17.9%. Xanadu (16.8%) and Google (16%) round out the top five, with Microsoft Azure Quantum (12.3%), qBraid (9.2%) and IonQ (6.6%) also popular. Respondents voiced interest across the board in trying new services within the next 12 months, a possible sign they have yet to find a service that fits their needs. Over the past two years it does not yet seem that there has been an increase in consolidation among the offerings.  Ease of use, Performance and Documentation are the most important factors for users in making their decision, a shift from last year where maintenance, documentation and price were the most important. 
+
+With regards to **Full-stack development platforms**, respondents have continued to indicate that  that IBM's Qiskit (including Qiskit Aer) is their most popular library (68.8%), though its popularity fell by 10% YoY.  This loss looks to be taken mostly by small increases in uses of SDKs outside the top five. This is followed by Xanadu’s PennyLane (29%) and Google's Cirq at (22.8%), with tket rounding out the top 5 at 19.8%, a 4% increase YoY. As last year, there is particular interest in starting to use the AWS Braket SDK within  the next 12 months. Joining AWS in libraries with more than 10% of users there is also QuTiP-QIP (an affiliated project of Unitary Fund and the only project of these not directly backed by a startup or corporate), as well as cuQuantum (Nvidia).Other popular libraries include Strawberry Fields, cudaQuantum, Q# (Microsoft) and Dwave's Ocean SDK.Documentation remains the most important factor respondents weigh when choosing an SDK, with Performance listed as the second most important factor.  
+
+With regards to **tools for applications**, Qiskit packages such as qiskit-optimization, qiskit-machine-learningremainamong the most popular, though their lead has lessened over the last year by about 10%., PennyLane's QML repo remains popular, and OpenQASM saw a 4% increase in use over 2022. Other popular projects include qiskit-nature, qiskit-finance, tensorflow-quantum, Unitary Fund's Mitiq for quantum error mitigation, and OpenFermion. There remains widespread interest in exploring other tools in the future, such as torchquantum, bskit, stim for quantum error correction, the PyZX compiler, Covalent, Superstaq and more. For these tools, documentation is well ahead as the most important factor, followed by performance and ease of use.
+
+In terms of main blockers that have caused respondents to not adopt technologies they would otherwise want to use, poor documentation and price remain the most common factors. The largest YoY change came with Tool Does Not Exist as a factor, which fell by 10%. 
+
+## OSS Development & Research [[Link]](https://unitaryfund.github.io/survey-website/#Open-source)
+With regards to **OSS development and research**, over 47% of respondents performing research define themselves as algorithm development and 45% as applications developers, with over a third involved in circuit development & optimization, software engineering, or quantum simulation/Physics. A sizable percentage are involved in quantum information theory (26%) as well. Other interests include quantum error mitigation (18%), and error correction (16.2%), both increasing YoY. While 13% or less selected fundamental physics, qubit characterization, and hardware development.  Algorithm development remains the highest in terms of most promising area of future research (55.9%), followed by error correction (49.5%), with application development, quantum simulation/physics, hardware development, circuit development and optimization, and error mitigation all ranking above 30%. 
+
+The most popular programming language is Python, which like last year remains at 94%. The second most popular framework remains C/C++ at 24%, with Julia, MATLAB and Rust rounding out the top 5. Julia featured the largest YoY growth up 4.6% to 14.6%.  Respondents also rated Python as the most promising language, with Rust, C/C++, Julia and Q# following. Notably Python’s lead in this category is definitely smaller than in the current programming language question. Jupyter Notebooks and notebooks in general remain very popular as tools for software development (used by 75.8% of respondents), with 67% of respondents using an integrated development environment (IDE) and 49% using the command line or terminal.
+
+## Community [[Link]](https://unitaryfund.github.io/survey-website/#Community)
+With respect to the quantum software **community**, 85% find it very welcoming or somewhat welcoming, and 11% neither welcoming nor unwelcoming or worse. 95% of respondents have a positive view of OSS in the quantum software community, with 75% finding it has a very positive impact and 20% a somewhat positive impact. This overall perception remains relatively constant since 2022. 
+
+Project documentation or project websites remain the most sought after sources of answers or information when developing quantum software (84%), with project repos (77%), a close second. Quantum Computing Stack Exchange, Stack Overflow, Slack, Discord, and YouTube, remain popular platforms, while less popular are standard forums (7%) and Reddit (6%). Among the types of resources most helpful for learning or contributing to quantum open source projects, video resources continue to rank highest, though lower this year by 6% (61%), followed very closely by digital education text resources (60%), as well as hackathons (53%), and participative courses, mentorship programs and certificate or degrees (all above 40%).
+
+
+### Community: Diversity & Inclusion
+About 43% of respondents are in the 25-34 age range, with 23% of respondents below 25 (but less than1% under 18 years old).
+
+With regards to ethnicity, about a 44% of respondents identifies as White or of European descent, 18% as South Asian, 9.4% as Hispanic or Latino/a/x, 6.8% as East Asian, and as Black or of African descent, and 4% or below as Black or African Descent, Multiracial, Middle Eastern, Other. Notably, 10% prefered not to say. 76% of the respondents identify as a man, 15.4% as a woman, 1.6% as non-binary, genderqueer, or gender non-conforming, 0.8% self describe and 6% prefer not to say. 
+
+With respect to educational background, the largest group holds a PhD (34%) or multiple ones (2.6%), 33% have Masters or other non-doctoral post-graduate degree, 23% have a university degree and 4% high school/secondary school degree, other degrees, or prefer not to say.
+
+### Open-ended Feedback 
+We highlight just a few responses giving feedback on the quantum OSS ecosystem below, that emphasize the work needed and requested to support quantum open source software:
+
+*“I think the community channels (e.g. discord) and GitHub discussions can be super useful.
+Especially for the libraries that are not yet so big, it is fantastic how much help you can get
+directly from the developers.”*
+
+*“We need strong policies that keep the technology open to every human being, regardless of their ethnicity, belief, country, etc.”*
+
+*“This is the most inviting and friendly community out there. Folks are extremely helpful and
+resourceful. People want to improve this field and want to help others to make it happen.
+Making the resources open source is the best move by researchers in the field. To those
+wondering, get involved and start contributing.”*
+
+*“Thank you. Keep doing what you are doing right now. If not for the quantum OSS community, I would not be doing research in quantum right now.”*
+
+*“We've made progress in growing the community and making it more welcoming, but there is
+still much work to be done in inclusion and retention of underrepresented groups.”*
+
+
+
+## Acknowledgements
+We are excited to repeat the survey in coming years and track the changes and trends in responses and in the field. This is possible thanks to UF Members (IBM Quantum, Scientifica Venture Capital, Agnostiq, AWS, Cisco, DoraHacks, Pasqal, Quandela, Qyber) and other supporters, including the National Science Foundation. Thank you to all that have participated and that will help share these findings.