Comment 4 for bug 1571698

I don't see any sign of it having been seeded on Ubuntu GNOME back as far as Trusty, and I doubt it is directly seeded anywhere.

apt-get source doesn't work by default anyway since the src archives are not enabled. Also you should generally use pull-lp-source to get source packages and avoid archive skew (this grabs the latest upload, rather than what has been published in -release). However that requires install ubuntu-dev-tools anyway., which is the first package anyone doing Ubuntu Development should install!

Just because its on the other images is not really justification, why is it on the other images, what is pulling it in? Is there a reason a normal user would need this package. You can trace the rdepends using the germinate output
http://people.canonical.com/~ubuntu-archive/germinate-output/ubuntu-gnome.xenial/rdepends/

and the seeds:
people.canonical.com/~ubuntu-archive/germinate-output/ubuntu-gnome.xenial/rdepends/
https://code.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-core-dev/ubuntu-seeds/ubuntu.xenial

I am still of the opinion developer tools shouldnt be on the image, our images are already much bigger than I would like, and if we added every useful utility that everyone asks for then it going to get even bigger.