This is typical Google/DeepMind ignorance. The rest of the world is non-exist.

I believe it started with Golang, where Go was already an existing language by a hobbyist - granted nobody was using it kinda lame to steal his name.

While I agree with the other two, I remember when Golang came out and no one except the author of the other Go language had ever heard of it.

Go was taken by ancient China before that.

maybe the game itself but the name is derived from Japanese, fairly recently

First Flume and now this.

Flume is a map reduce framework at google and it is also the same name as a product by apache.

Ignorance, or arrogance? I find it hard to believe that devs at the caliber Google employs are ignorant of existing software, especially when it's in the same (or related) domain.

I'm starting to this we need namespaces for open source projects so we could refer to deep-learning:impala and database:impala. The java reverse domain name notation does handle this to a degree but I feel something could be done in this area to make the naming issue easier.

There are like 10 projects called themselves Aurora. Naming clash is nothing new, and can someone really claim a word or phrase as taken?

It doesn't matter if you "claim" it, but it's still confusing and harder to search for.

"Impala" != "IMPALA", and the domain is very different: "distributed database" vs "RL agent with game zoo", nobody's going to meet one in the same space as the other, to create confusion.

Err, I worked in a place that was using Spark-SQL (which is an Apache Impala competitor) and was doing deep learning (if not RL).