Screw both Apple and Google.

People will say they support open-source via certain projects but the proof is in the pudding.

If they're using OSM data to cement one of their key platform apps, they need to donate money, lots of it, and be public about it.

Remember, as fanboys like to crow, Apple has $100 billion of cash lying around and Google's share price is sky high.

It's not that simple unfortunately. Both of those companies would basically have to agree to be collaborators rather than competitors. Both companies would probably have a bunch of pissed-off shareholders who didn't agree with the move (who are the people who actually own those companies; technically that money belongs to them). Both companies would also get punished by the stock market, which favors competitiveness over cooperation for obvious reasons, which in turn would hurt shareholders.

None of those things are intrinsically wrong or bad- if they weren't so competitive, they probably wouldn't have all that money in the first place, and as users we might not have any sort of maps at all on the Internet, or much lower-quality ones.

None of those things are intrinsically correct or good either, as users would surely benefit from that type of cooperation. It's just The Way It Is.

I wish the type of collaboration you describe could happen, and maybe it will some day. It's easy to anthropomorphize corporations as super rich individuals who sell stuff to people and aren't beholden to anyone, which is exactly what the tech press does most of the time, but the reality is way more complicated.