Paul O’Brian from Modaco has broken the news that the HTC Desire and HTC Legend have already been ‘rooted‘ prior to their official release. It would seem as though both of these devices are going to walk the same path of The Nexus One and follow the same fate too. By ‘rooting’ a device you gain access to the highest level Administrative rights owned by the user ‘root’.

The name of the login account given full and complete access to all system resources or the “superuser”. Also used to describe the directory named “/”as in, “the root directory.”

Technically speaking, the Desire and Legend are not actually available in the stores right now and yet Modaco have recently Twittered that they have gain root access to the device. Root access means that the devices can now both receive custom firmware and indeed have their own firmware exported to other devices. We’re not quite sure how HTC will respond to this but it is impressive work nonetheless! Word on the wire is that they are already working on a fix for one of the methods used to gain ‘root’ access.

[Via Twitter]