I'm trying to figure out how to build Mono without the patented, non ECMA components, such as Winforms.
Miguel de Icaza said that Mono would be split in two, so that we could build only the parts under Microsoft's Community Promise. It doesn't seem like this has happened yet.
Is there any way to do this yet?
I don't think this is possible at the moment. It should be pretty easy to do it manually by editing mcs/class/Makefile. Just chop out what you don't want/need. Also (I could be wrong but) isn't there only a potential licensing issue from using the non ECMA stuff not building it...
Well in truth it is pretty hard to make an ECMA only version of Mono, as many things you really need in day-to-day programming is not covered by ECMA, and so you'd have a broken runtime. Better just to try not to use the "big libraries" that are surely out of ECMA scope like System.Windows.Forms, because if you try to exclude some non-ECMA classes from the 3 core libraries (corlib, System and System.Xml) it will probably break the compiler and most utilities and programs written for Mono.