What are you not against is the question.
So not on the ground then?
Well, that’s life, man. It was there at one point and someone tagged it. The fact that the sign was removed doesn’t make the developer of the place incorrect.
Wow, that’s the craziest reach I’ve read on this thread. I think you underestimate how easy it is to find the developer of a housing estate. I usually search up its name, and immediately find the developer (website, socials, article, etc.). If not, then I don’t add it.
Honestly, the proposal makes no attempt to explain the use case, only saying that the information is interesting. And sure, we can collect lots of information, but we have WikiData for that.
As it’s already in use, the only purpose of this proposal would be to define what a “developer” is, but it also fails at that. I guess you could use the approval to prevent deprecation?
At best we’d need a second proposal to actually define all the details, this proposal only says “This tag exists”, which per ATYL is already the case.
I don’t see the point in this exercise.
I do not think the existence of Wikidata means we should not collect the information that we care about. Wikidata is not OpenStreetMap, it is a different community, has different rules and definitions, is even contested to be free of third party intellectual rights, so it is not an alternative. It might be a valuable addition, but it is not an argument to not collect information ourselves.
So speaking from India, while I haven’t mapped any developer tags myself yet, IMO they would actually be very useful and it was actually something I was looking for in the recent past. Frankly I would argue that developer would be even more important than architect, builder, etc in India.
India is going through a major development phase and in every major city nearly every new building (residential or commercial) has a big fat developer prominently attached to it – also in very literal ways. The physical signs are everywhere on their projects, and if they’re one of the bigger names they will have advertisements across the city as well as promote it on their websites.
Example of a couple big names advertising on their websites:
One use case for me is effectively using developer as an additional filter – in India we extensively use names for buildings; however this leads to a case where multiple buildings, sometimes even from the same city have the same name and using developer could be an additional identifying filter.
Old buildings might not have this information and it would simply be blank, same as quite a few other OSM tags.
Or maybe you want to look at all projects by a certain developer and want to view their amenities/features as mapped on ground, and don’t want to rely just on official websites filled with corpo-speak?
Great answer @kasa_kai.
It’s exactly the same situation in Morocco. This might sound rare for people from more developed countries like the US or the UK, but in less-developed/developing countries, the situation is often the same: a few multi-billion dollar companies have the control over all big developments in the country, especially real estate. I can think of TGCC, Palmeraie Développement, Addoha and CGI here for example. They develop so many projects, and you see signs wherever you go, that they become part of the environment in a way.
Good to know that happens in other countries as well 
It’s also why I think the complementary tags are of use, as further identifiers.
One thing though @ilias I think you also need to add a vote end date to your proposal as per the wiki
Thanks @kasa_kai, I just did.
I map the model homes and such knowing full well that I’ll need to remap them as ordinary houses once the subdivision is fully built out. That can take several years, plenty of time for OSM to catch it while it’s still relevant, so I think a key for it is fine. Hopefully whoever gets into this form of micromapping will come back and update it eventually. If not, it’s pretty obvious when a development was mapped in its early stages and needs an update.
The home builder may leave their name around as part of the development’s entrance sign, or they may not. In cases where this detail is no longer signposted, I’m not opposed to removing the tag, but it’s pretty minor compared to other unobservable details that people map.
It’s not terribly rare here in the U.S. either. It’s just that we’ve been fixated on the sort of suburban development that needs this separate key the least. The more pressing need here is to get the various apartment complex brands added to the name suggestion index as brand=*s. But I don’t oppose the key if it’s useful somewhere else.
Yes, that’s pretty clear from the temporary documentation page though not from the formal proposal. I just find it ironic that we’re focusing on suburban residential developments as the use case. In this context, the homebuilder so often doubles as both the developer and builder and pulls up their sign afterwards. But in commercial real estate and public works projects, the developer and builder very often are both notable in their own right and observable for as long as the structure is still around, typically on a fancy plaque.
Need tagging for the politicians who cut the ribbon at the opening ceremony…
