There are clear business reasons why the achievement of the functionality of more and more industrial products is definitely shifted to the use of embedded software replacing earlier hardware solutions. It is commonly known that the elicitation, identification, analysis, specification, modeling, validation, and management of the requirements in general and of functional safety requirements in particular is a demanding process with special implications for the case of software also reflected in related general and industry specific standards. This paper gives a brief overview of standard approaches to functional safety with examples from the medical domain. It is highlighted that one of the key requirements of all approaches is traceability. The emerging Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) technology, exploiting the architecture of the World Wide Web, is shown to have a determining impact on the future of the satisfaction of traceability requirements of safety-critical software development among others.