Their prerogative is to make money via closed-source offerings so they can afford safety work and their open-source offerings. Ilya noted this near the beginning of the company. A company can't muster the capital needed to make SOTA models giving away everything for free when their competitor is Google, a huge for-profit company.
As per your claim that they are scammy, what about them is scammy?
Not sure specifically what the commenter is referring to re: scammy, but things like the Scarlett Johansson / Her voice imitation and copyright infringement come to mind for me.
GPT-OSS is not a near-state-of-the-art model: it is a model deliberately trained in a way that it appears great in the evaluations, but is unusable and far underperforms actual open source models like Ollama. That's scammy.
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pLC3bx77AckafHdkq/gpt-oss-is...
[2] https://huggingface.co/openai/gpt-oss-20b/discussions/14