Decoupling the Quantum Stack: How the Eclipse Foundation contributes to Europe’s sovereign quantum vision

As the quantum computing race accelerates with physical hardware breakthroughs, the industry is hitting a critical roadblock: software. According to industry research, 73% of enterprise professionals fear lock-in from proprietary software stacks. This concern is intensified by a highly siloed ecosystem, where the lack of a unified development environment forces developers to navigate incompatible APIs across different vendors' hardware.

The Eclipse Foundation is stepping directly into this breach, positioning itself at the centre of the European quantum vision. With Eclipse Qrisp as the nucleus of our open source quantum software portfolio and by actively participating in two European research and innovation projects - Q-VERSE and SecQDevOps - the Foundation is nurturing the vital open source momentum needed for an interoperable quantum stack. 

Learning from history: The software bottleneck

To understand the strategic necessity of this work, let’s look at classical computing history. Classical computing began with a proprietary era of closed ecosystems and vendor-specific operating systems, resulting in high costs and vendor lock-in. Portability was only unlocked when standardised languages, open operating systems (UNIX), and protocols decoupled software from hardware. Today's quantum landscape risks repeating these proprietary mistakes, and the Eclipse Foundation is actively working to prevent it.

Today’s quantum software is highly fragmented, with isolated gate-based, annealing, and simulator architectures running on vendor-specific software stacks and incompatible APIs. This lack of portability creates intense vendor lock-in and opens the door to a hyperscaler-dominated "Quantum-as-a-Service" (QaaS) oligopoly. Hyperscaler control over quantum runtimes threatens European digital sovereignty, introducing high switching costs and limiting global standards influence. To counter this, Europe must establish an open, interoperable quantum computing ecosystem that supports diverse hardware platforms through the creation of a technology-agnostic software stack. 

From open source to open collaboration: Why governance matters

Transitioning to an open quantum ecosystem requires separating software from physical backends using open source abstraction. However, open source licensing alone is not enough. While licenses are necessary to drive adoption, open collaboration is required to establish transparent governance, IP management, predictability, and sustainability. Without these, competitors cannot securely collaborate on pre-competitive infrastructure to build high-value proprietary products on top. This is where the Eclipse Foundation plays its most crucial role. As a neutral steward with robust governance and clear IP frameworks, the Foundation provides a safe, business-friendly and vendor-neutral ecosystem. 

We invite diverse industrial players, research centres, and SMEs to collaborate in the open, turning fragmented software, research and innovation into professional, production-grade, and vendor-neutral quantum software.

Eclipse Qrisp: The catalyst of our quantum portfolio

A major building block for the European open source quantum ecosystem is Eclipse Qrisp. Originally started by Fraunhofer FOKUS, Eclipse Qrisp is the first open source high-level quantum programming language developed entirely in Europe. It acts as a hardware-agnostic abstract developer interface, enabling users to program complex quantum algorithms without needing low-level physics expertise. By providing various backend connectors, Qrisp allows applications to run across different physical simulators and hardware architectures. It represents a major milestone in placing European innovation at the forefront of the global quantum race. 

Supercharging European quantum software research with open collaboration

For over a decade, the Eclipse Foundation has been a reliable partner in European research projects, ensuring that cutting-edge research results are successfully transformed into industry-ready open source software. We are proud to bring our expertise to two highly relevant European research projects: Q-VERSE and SecQDevOps. Our strategic involvement in these initiatives is designed to build a unified European alternative, proving that technological sovereignty is a code-first reality built on collaborative open source infrastructure.

The Q-VERSE project is directly tackling stack fragmentation by expanding Eclipse Qrisp into a technology-agnostic European Quantum SDK. Q-VERSE’s mission is to bridge different quantum paradigms - including gate-based, annealing, and simulator platforms - into a single interface, reducing application development time by 40% compared to vendor-specific SDKs. Q-VERSE compiles high-level Qrisp programs into a universal intermediate representation supporting OpenQASM, QIR, and Quil, while dynamically discovering physical hardware features at runtime. Furthermore, the project integrates quantum workflows with EuroHPC supercomputers, using GAIA-X compliant connectors to enforce European data residency and sovereignty rules end-to-end. Q-VERSE is validating this stack across four critical industrial pilots: railway rolling stock optimisation with DB Systel, financial ESG portfolio risk analysis with Multiverse Computing, molecular docking simulations for drug discovery at TECNALIA, and privacy-preserving telecom analytics for OTE.

The SecQDevOps project addresses the critical security gaps that arise when developers prioritise innovation speed over cybersecurity. SecQDevOps is building an automated secure DevOps pipeline specifically designed for quantum applications. Alongside real-world pilots in healthcare and energy grid management, a dedicated open source pilot focuses on hardening and auditing the Eclipse Qrisp framework itself - aiming to achieve 80% automated testing coverage to ensure compliance with the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA). Additionally, the project is building secure, hardware-aware compilers to prevent physical side-channel attacks, and launching the Internet of Quantum Things (IoQT) - a distributed virtual testing platform connecting emulators across geographically dispersed secure nodes for collaborative, secure protocol testing. This collaborative "playground" is so impactful because it democratises access, allowing developers to safely simulate real-world quantum network conditions and eliminate critical vulnerabilities early without needing access to scarce, multi-million-dollar physical hardware.

A unified European vision

Together, Q-VERSE and SecQDevOps represent a unified, "code-first" approach to European technological sovereignty. By pooling resources around Eclipse Qrisp as a shared open platform, these projects are creating robust alternatives to proprietary ecosystems. They ensure that European businesses, researchers, and developers can build the quantum future on a foundation that is interoperable, secure by design, and completely sovereign.

Join us

Through open governance, neutral stewardship, and strategic project engagement, the Eclipse Foundation ensures that Europe's quantum future is built on an open foundation that is fully interoperable, secure by design, and strictly sovereign.

Visit the Research at Eclipse website to learn more about the Foundation’s work in European research projects and contact us to get involved: research@eclipse.org