Copy/paste without attribution to license or permission is more blatant.

Organizationally he was given free reign to do whatever he wanted, and that lead to the entire teams downfall. He canceled code reviews... for himself. Well, he actually stated, all code reviews go through him, thus he "code reviewed" his own code. I remember he was once a few weeks late on delivering a basic landing page, and when it finally got to QA at 9pm on a Friday, our entire team was forced to work the weekend and QA gave me a TFS export of more than 200 defects I had to fix because he was unreachable. Needless to say, our entire team was upset we all got laid off, but also relieved because we all ended up in better jobs. At least everyone I've talked to, which is everyone but him, as he has never responded to a single text message or email since he quit after the layoff (he refused severance, and just walked out), all his socials went off line, and any record of his name has disappeared from the internet. I'm fairly certain he was a conman, but I have no way of finding out.

Maybe hired by a competitor to tank the company intentionally? I would not put it past many big companies to do something like that.

That takes some skill. I was almost duped like that by someone we nearly hired for a sales position, which is much easier to fake for a few months, especially working remote.

He can believe the GPL isn’t real all he wants. In that case how did he justify breaching copyright law?

> I had a "senior" dev...

Ftfy.

His resumé seemed to back up his claim. Not sure if it was real, though. HR called every one of my past employers and my references, so I figured they would have followed up on his, too.

Yes, I know the type - I have met a few of "senior" devs that were anything but. I can imagine their past employer didn't even know their true worth, or lack of. Sorry you had that experience.