It's an example of fraudulent / malicious behavior found by decompiling industrial logic controllers, with incontrovertible evidence of illegality. Obviously no two situations are ever going to be the exact same, but I think it's clear why the analogy was made.
Yes, but “Dieselgate” is not appropriate here because that term has “cheating” loaded onto it, which represents a different struggle for companies than vendor lock-in. What this company is doing is related to DRM and arguably closer to what John Deere does with its products.
