I'm getting sick and tired of the Appleism of everyday language.  Apple likes to prefix lots of their products with a lowercase i.  Things like iTunes and iPod are examples.  However, it seems that many folks are applying the lowercase i to other things incorrectly.  Two are really starting to bug me: types of BGP speakers and Iperf.

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is a protocol used on the Internet to distribute reachability information between routers.  A router can speak two types of BGP: internal BGP or external BGP (or both).  RFC 4271 defines these terms in section 1.1:

   EBGP
      External BGP (BGP connection between external peers).

   IBGP
      Internal BGP (BGP connection between internal peers).

Yes, the RFC says IBGP and EBGP instead of iBGP and eBGP.  If you write IBGP as iBGP you are wrong.  Same goes for EBGP written as eBGP.

This really annoys me.  Apple didn't invent BGP.  They had nothing to do with it.  You don't buy BGP in the iTunes store, or on your iPhone.  You don't pay Apple a fee every month to use BGP (well, ok, in a way you do, since a minescule amount of Apple's network infrastructure costs are passed on to you if you use the App. Store or other Apple services - but who cares, that's not the point).

Please stop writing eBGP and iBGP.

The other application that is often written incorrectly is Iperf.  Iperf is a Unix (and Windows) command-line network performance testing suite.  It has a client & server version, and works over TCP or UDP.  It even supports IPv6.

Iperf is written as Iperf, not iPerf.  Apple didn't write it.  It was written by some folks at NLANR/DAST.  You can't buy it using iTunes, and you can't get the U2 version of it.

Please stop writing Iperf as iPerf.  It's just wrong.

Thanks!

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