Contrary to other countries, in Germany the creator of a (sufficiently large) work has an imprescriptible ownership of that work. So the most the contract can say is that I sell the customer an exclusive, all-encompassing license. But I'm still owner of the code (whatever that means then...).

I agree with BrowserUk that the value of a programmer should be recognized and rewarded; on the other hand, it would make software licensing much more complicated if everybody had to pay royalties to any major contributor of a commercial project.

In the end it boils down to the ownership of non-material values; the laws of which mostly reach back to a time where information spread very slow, and was mostly long-lived, and create very weird, unfair situations today.

So far I haven't really seen good ideas on how to handle that in fair manner in the general case. It's one of the open problems of our times, and I'm eager to see what the future brings here.