SAP and Deutsche Telekom -- two large IT corporations -- are the main developers. I don't know why the government doesn't hold the copyright, maybe it should. They've released it as free software, though (Apache license).
As far as I know, in Germany copyright cannot be transferred. There is a special and limited exception for direct employees, so the company can hold the copyright, but I doubt that a client (like the government) could hold it.
IANAL, but AFAIK there is no exception for employees. The employee still holds the copyright, but there is usually a clause in the employment contract that gives the employer "unrestricted usage rights" for any copyrightable product of the employee.
Especially software developers should read those parts of their employment contracts carefully, as they may be overly broad and sometimes accompanied by weird clauses regarding their OSS work.
Not just unrestricted usage, exclusive unrestricted usage, which is why it could be a problem (instead of just being a simple case of dual licencing) if the contract claims rights to off-hours work.
German law has a clear distinction between authorship rights and usage rights. Usage rights, including reproduction, can be sold, rented, perhaps even taken illegally at gunpoint, I don't know. It's just your run off the mill intellectual property. But authorship rights cannot be transferred at all except through inheritance, it's simply impossible for A to pay B to relinquish the right to state that B is the creator of X. But outside of literature and music where special compensation schemes exist this is only about recognition and has zero economic relevance.
This authorship right is also only available to natural persons, so it's clearly not the reason why SAP and T-Systems are still claiming copyright. It just wasn't something the state buyer cared about and given that they apparently did care to get the code under Apache 2 I can't fault them, the result is almost like a reimentation of the recognition part for companies instead of natural persons.
Inheritance is very relevant in those special fields where a regulated compensation scheme exists in parallel to the sale of usage rights (literature and musical scores). The organisations that are responsible for distribution are kind of notorious for being dominated by heirs. Unsurprisingly, because current creators create, whereas heirs focus all their energy on maximising the harvest.
Another implication that occasionally comes up to freak everybody out is that there is some legal basis for creators to have a word in changes to their work, which can be a total PITA for organizations that once commissioned a building from a famous architect who left assertive offspring.
I was wondering this as well, I did some digging. It's really interesting actually, it doesn't seem that Germany is that much of a veteran when it comes to copyright (In the early 1900's they virtually didn't have any copyright law in place).
To your question, yes you can inherit something from your grandmother. Inheritance is designated by the original author, and enacted in the event of their death (As far as I can tell).
I'm not German, but as far as I know they have similar system to the one we have in Poland - you can transfer exclusive financial copyrights to another entity but you cannot transfer personal copyrights (so that you can say that you are the author of particular work even if you cannot license it to 3rd parties).
In practice, even though personal copyright is not transferable, many employers require you to sign additional civil contract in which you declare that you will never exercise your personal copyright.
Copyright (at least the closest German equivalent of it) is non-transferable and automatically belongs to the creator, so it isn't really meaningful anyway. That's what licenses are for.
