Talk about beating a dead horse. By pushing this agenda, all you are doing is hardening TK's resolve against releasing anything, or even agreeing to sell you the code. And even if by some miracle you've managed to convince him (to sell or release the source code), you would quickly discover that you'd bought a dog with fleas.......which is, I suspect, the real reason behind his reticence.
Now, if you're truly on the level regarding this, you would have asked your programmer friend exactly what is required to create a modern opened-sourced combat flight simulator, and what it would take to assemble a team to start working on it. My bet is that you would soon find yourself realizing that you'd be much better off financially by going with DCS-World, or even something along the lines of FSX with the VRS TACPACK and Superbug addons.