If only university's had some way of getting funding from, I don't know, something like teaching courses, that could be used to pay people to maintain and update the software they depend on.

I just finished a Graduate diploma at a local University, a single subject had over 100 students each paying $3500 to do that subject alone yet the Uni tried to claim they didn't have the staff/resources to update that course (that was 10 hours of face to face class time) each session. I find it hard to imagine that running that one session cost even a fraction of the $350,000 paid by students to run such that there was nothing left over to fund resourcing for updating the materials.