Sadly around the time this history comes to an end OUCS (now IT Services) abandoned much of its work with bespoke open source development to become the Microsoft money funnel it is now. I say "sadly" not just out of a preference for free software: the way in which this was done deeply affected the mental health of some of the staff involved.
Yeah, a lot of UK universities seem to have gone this route (the number who pay huge sums of money to use the atrocious Blackboard software is scandalous). I think they got burnt by their old-school proprietary software being outcompeted by modern software practices in the private sector. But what they really ought to do is create a non-profit collective that is shared between all (or tens of - you wouldn't need that many to make it a huge saving) universities in the UK to write the software they need for them.
I'm not sure it was a rational decision based on experiences with proprietary software. It sounds like good old grift to me.
> 1994 In September a Digital Alpha 2100 server with four processors and 1 gigabyte of memory (known as sable) was installed to replace black as the University's general-purpose Unix server.
> 1996 In June a second Digital Alpha server was installed (known as ermine). This was bought because the load on sable was much greater than had been envisaged.
I remember those. They ran OSF/1. At the time i arrived, sable was for staff and graduate students, and ermine was for undergraduates. In the few years i was there, demand for shell accounts declined to much that they retured ermine, and moved the undergraduates over to sable.
(i might have the two machines the wrong way round)