I have a personal project started in 2018, which essentially aims at running Arduino code on an FPGA and is posted on Github. Being not very imaginative while picking a name, I just added the "duino" suffix to the CPU core name. The project was essentially dormant until recently when someone posted a blog article and a video tutorial about it, and I got a few issue reports.
At this point I have discovered that there is another project on Github with essentially the same name. It uses a different approach (extending Arduino IDE rather than FPGA IDE), so the two projects share almost no common code, but they strive to achieve the same goal and can obviously be mixed up. The sister project seems inactive, with the last commit dated 2016.
I don't think this name collision will actually transform into an actual problem anytime soon (if ever), but it made me curious: how would such conflict be resolved if it did? Could the author of the other project force me to rename mine, on the grounds that his project started earlier? Is such right to the name persistent, or can it "expire" if a project is unused / abandoned for some time, similar to a trade mark?
If that makes any difference, my project is a derivative work of Arduino core library, released under LGPLv2. The sister project doesn't specify a license explicitly, and seems to include parts of Arduino core library and a custom GCC toolchain.