JP2KAK is the ​Kakadu based ​GDAL Driver for JPEG2000 image data. There are several other JPEG2000 drivers as well (JPEG200 - JasPer, JP2MRSID - MrSID SDK, JP2ECW - ECW SDK). The Kakadu library is proprietary, but can be licensed under reasonable terms for various uses. Unfortunately it comes with a slightly unusual build system which makes it hard to build against.

Unix/Linux Builds

This is how I setup to use Kakadu 6.0 on my 64bit linux system with GDAL 1.4.x. Other makefiles exist for 32bit linux and a few other variations. You may have to fiddle with the makefiles some if your environment is odd.

unzip v6_0-00256n.zip 
mv v6_0-00256N kakadu-6.0
cd kakadu-6.0/coresys/make
make -f Makefile-Linux-x86-64-gcc
cd ../../apps/make

Edit to add -fPIC in compile options.

make -f Makefile-Linux-x86-64-gcc

Then I configure GDAL like this:

./configure --with-kakadu=/home/warmerda/pkg/kakadu-6.0

and build. The Kakadu libraries are used as static libraries, so there are no .so's to carry along.