So it's not surprising that already in early stages of development, several people started to work on providing it with network capabilities. After Ross quit active development in May 1993, Fred van Kempen began to work on a new implementation, rewriting major parts of the code. This ongoing effort is known as Net-2. Net-3 after 1.0 was released. This is the version of the networking code currently included in the official kernel releases.
Development currently moves toward the necessary stability to reliably run it on Internet hosts.
Beside these facilities, there are several projects going on that will enhance the versatility of . Alan Cox has also implemented a driver for Novell's IPX protocol, but the effort for a complete networking suite compatible with Novell's has been put on hold for the moment, because of Novell's unwillingness to provide the necessary documentation. Another very promising undertaking is samba, a free NetBIOS server for , written by Andrew Tridgell.