It doesn't surprise me that newtek has a different definition of Multiply; they adopt several other Standards which are not the same as the rest of the industry.

In principle there is nothing wrong with this as long as they make it clear and enable/allow it to be easy to swap between the systems so as to make their product compatible with the rest of the 3d community.

What strikes me as particularly odd is that SmithMicro, when writing the PoserFusion plugin for parsing Poser files to Lightwave did not bother to change the blending mode automatically to generate normal colours on objects, or at least allow the user the option to do so.