But there’s another use of the phrase social enterprise that predates that. It refers to various non-profits that use market principles to social good, and to for-profit businesses whose raison d’etre is to do some social good.

You might expect a cloud computing company like NetSuite to be making a lot of noise about the first definition, but today it’s making some news about the second. NetSuite sells cloud-based financial and enterprise resource planning software. Today its philanthropic arm, NetSuite.org, announced it is donating or offering big discounts to five organizations.

Non-profits and social enterprises, they generally rely upon the kindness of donors, have the same urgent need to stretch their operational budgets that businesses do, and so the efficiency gains from cloud-based software is appealing for its efficiency gain, especially when it’s donated or heavily discounted. The base donation includes NetSuite’s complete software suite, five user licenses and ongoing support just like any customer. Discounts are tied to the applicant’s size by revenue with small organizations who bring in $2 million or less per year receiving outright donations, while larger ones get discounts ranging from 50 percent to 80 percent.

Non-profits have a lot of the same needs that businesses do, because they rely on the kindness of donors, just as urgent a need to stretch their operational dollars as far as they can. “When we looked at what good we could do in the world, we found that there were a lot of organizations in the world that look like companies, but which exist to make the world a better place,” David Geilhufe, program manager for NetSuite.org told me.

The five lucky organizations are: Easy Office which offers accounting and bookeeping services to non-profit organizations; United Prosperity, a micro-lending organization EdTec, which helps charter schools manage their accounting and IT; and Envirofit, which sells clean-burning cook stoves in 40 countries.

NetSuite also said it it has donated software to micro-lending site Kiva.org, which has helped arrange more than $175 million worth of loans to 450,000 small businesses owners in 57 countries. Kiva needed help managing the expenses of employees who are constantly traveling the world, a task complicated by all the currencies involved.

As it turned out, the issue was “human error,” as noted by Google exec Marissa Mayer on the official Google blog.

But Mayer updated her blog post after Maxim Weinstein, manager of the nonprofit malware watchdog organization, StopBadware.org, wrote on the group’s blog that Google (GOOG) had erroneously implied that its list of malware URLs comes directly from StopBadware, a claim that indirectly caused the nonprofit to take heavy flak for Google’s malware snafu. To clarify the relationship between the two, he wrote, Google partners with StopBadware to create the criteria that determine which sites make its malware list, but does not actually come up with specific sites that should be there.

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Writing about however many millions of dollars go to however many frivolous widget companies is about as interesting as watching Robert Scoble’s blog video lectures. (Sorry, Bob!)

So it is nice to see a good (and good-for-you) charity site like DonorsChoose get some money and, hopefully, attention.

The site, which lets teachers upload proposals for resources and projects–from books to playgrounds–they need funding for and matches them with donors, has to be limited in geography. But today, it will open its services to every public school in the U.S. to allow teachers nationwide to get their wish lists fulfilled online.

With the national expansion, the nonprofit hopes be on track to becoming 100% self-sustaining, according to its founder, a former Bronx schoolteacher named Charles Best.

That’s due to $11 million in possible funding from a panoply of big Web players. EBay Founder Pierre Omidyar has promised to pony up $6 million, with Yahoo’s David Filo, longtime VC Vinod Khosla and Netflix’s Reed Hastings adding in the rest. (Khosla was an early supporter, allowing the site to expand to the San Francisco area from its New York base.)

The catch for the funding? Omidyar will release the bulk of his commitment only if DonorsChoose completes the round by Nov. 30.

It seems like a pretty good investment to me, using the Internet to clarify and amplify the donating process. Sort of like eBay meets Match.com meets Amazon. So far, the site has given away $14.5 million to projects.

Best says DonorsChoose authenticates every project proposal before posting it. Then it purchases the resources when a project is funded and sends the goods off to teachers, with some donors also adding in more money to pay for fulfillment costs.

That will now be a lot cheaper and more efficient due to a donation by Ariba of fulfillment software and services to DonorsChoose that the site values at over $2 million. That follows a donation by Filo, said Best, of five Yahoo engineers who were lent to DonorsChoose full-time for five months to rewrite its code base.

But Best is more articulate than I can be, so here is a video of him talking about his site: