[drallison]

The possibility that Oracle might prevail keeps me awake some nights.

Oracle's "original software" is not. It is derivative of other work, for example, Smalltalk and its libraries. The idea of including explicit interface declarations with each module was, I think, introduced by the programming language SUE designed by Rick Holt.

Copyright does not protect ideas; copyright can only protect the expression. And when the two are intrinsically combined, there cannot be copyright.