You can consider the university course as being your backup plan.
Edinburgh (and Glasgow/Dundee/Aberdeen) has a great tech community. Between university and meeting people from the tech community you'll have plenty of things to do.
Being a CS student would open a lot more doors than not having a degree.
I help organise a monthly tech meeting called Techmeetup ( http://techmeetup.co.uk ) and we get a lot of people who are looking to find (paid) interns/hire full time employees/find co-founders.
I went in person to each university's international student office ( or whatever that's called ) and told them I'd like to transfer.
Edinburgh Uni was like "We can't do that because bla bla bla" but Heriot Watt and Napier only wanted my transcripts from my university in Romania.
Ended up going for an undergraduate MEng in Software Engineering at Heriot Watt.
The transfer process was a piece of cake.
Just to give you an idea of the timeline:
-June 2007 came to Edinburgh
-July 2007 visited the student office of all 3 universities
-August 2007 sent Heriot Watt my transcripts and was offered a place
-October 2007 started the MEng course.
If this doesn't make you want to give it a shot I don't know what will.
Edit: And did I mention that I didn't have to pay University fees? Free education FTW :)