However creating a fork with the same acronym and name for the daemon or binaries or whatever seems pretty under-handed.
Was a release announcement for the original software moderated, on a list where release announcements had been posted without moderation before the fork? Was the author banned from lists?
A ban did occur on the LAD mailing list, but to the best of my knowledge the ban occurred due to some off list emails with one of the list moderators.
That's why Ubuntu has the alternatives system. And why mawk / gawk / etc. are often linked to /bin/awk.
And it's entirely possible to use different software names for projects that implement a compatible API or service, the claim that it's for compatibility is pretty bogus. It's not "standard", especially not for an adversarial fork. And that's not why the alternatives system exists, the alternatives system exists so differently named packages can implement a particular service (i.e., exactly the opposite, for the equivalent in shell commands). So that's underhanded.
They are used to make packages with differently named binaries able to implement standard shell commands.
There is no need to match binary names. It doesn't really help with anything.