JACK was developed by a community of open-source developers led by Paul Davis (who won an Open Source Award in 2004 for this work)[3] and has been a key piece of infrastructure and the de facto standard for professional audio software on Linux since its inception in 2002.

[2] The JACK API is standardized by consensus, and two compatible implementations exist: jack1, which is implemented in plain C and has been in maintenance mode for a while, and jack2 (originally jackdmp), a re-implementation in C++ originally led by Stéphane Letz, which introduced multi-processor scalability and support for operating systems other than Linux.

One or both implementations can run on Linux, macOS, Solaris, Windows, iOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD.

[5] If used as a replacement for ALSA and PulseAudio as well, it can unify the different sound servers and APIs that might be typically found on a machine, and allow better integration between different software.

[10] Real-time tuning work culminated in numerous scheduling improvements to the mainline kernel and the creation of an -rt branch for more intrusive optimizations in the release 2.6.24, and later the CONFIG_PREEMPT_RT patch.