Mahesh's Twentyfirst Law - Mature Technologies

Any sufficiently mature technology will be independently rediscovered

Corollary
Software development is the art of reinventing the wheel, and more importantly taking credit for it!

Corollary 2
Re-invented wheels are invariably much suckier than the original

Note
This is reaching epidemic proportions in the software industry.  Particularly humorous (or grotesque?) are the fields of Fault Tolerance (Its called Erlang. Go look it up), and Active Queue Management (Kathleen Nichols and Van Jacobson. If you don't know the names, you shouldn't be messing with queues)