Today is was announced that IBM as well as "BEA, Borland, the dojo Foundation, the Eclipse Foundation, Laszlo Systems, Mozilla Corporation, Novell, Openwave Systems, Oracle, Red Hat, Yahoo, Zend Zimbra... and Google." Will be taking part in a initiative to promote the development of Open Source tools centered around AJAX.

Apparently this announcement is being made ahead of one from Microsoft's "Atlas" initiative. This Microsoft initiative will apparently add AJAX support to ASP.NET.

Source: IBM Leads "Open AJAX" Coalition of Web 2.0 Vendors