JP2KAK is the [http://www.kakadusoftware.com/ Kakadu] based [http://www.gdal.org/frmt_jp2kak.html 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. 

(this is in progress - my build with v6 isn't actually working yet)

{{{
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 ../../
cp lib/Linux-x86-64-gcc/* /usr/local/lib
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.